2021 is the year we found out we don’t know how to do anything, although the line then between not knowing how to do anything and believing that we do runs along a line of emotionalism and a paralyzing feeling that the pandemic has thickened. From the Digital Natives to the Baby Boomers, the not-knowing-how-to-do-something means only one thing: Google, and the problem shows up in the head in the form of a url, already full of answers, or a title, because after all there is no time (“how to have more time?” we’ll look up later).
2021 is the year we had no answers, so unable to reframe the present by following the pace and speed with which problems, or what we in turn chose to be problems, piled up. All the answers we went looking for on Google, which as every year published Year in Search, the report that analyzes the most searched terms on the search engine during the calendar year. We were so out of answers that, never before as in 2021, we searched for “doomscrolling”. A Nolan metadependence that had us searching for the meaning of what we were doing, at the time we were doing it.
HOW-WHERE-WHEN-WHO-WHY
The search entries collected by Google tell how we didn’t have too much need to know about the “Who” it wasn’t the year of representatives rather of themes, which inspired a discussion of content and not a contest to elect the-best-to. Less so than in 2020, when disbelief was vented in the search for past precedents, in the past year we didn’t need to wonder about the “When” things occurred, so clearly embedded in the present that we couldn’t keep up with Google page refreshes. The “Where” wasn’t a mystery either, Australia, Afghanistan or Capitol Hill were precise geographic coordinates for us, we knew full well what was happening at the time it was happening, there was so much everything that nothingness managed to hide well. compared to the pre-pandemic period, only the “Where to Travel” searches tripled, predictable but not consoling, come to think of it.
What Year in Search highlights is how the “How” searches have been lacking. The question has been asked many times to seek outside solutions. “How to open a business” was typed more times than “How to look for a job,” the all-time high for searches on “how to protect the environment” and “how to protect the community” would be enough to tell the tale of two big shadows that 2021 highlighted. The biggest “How’s” that Google shows us are the ones where the search bar has turned into a help desk, spouting pleas so garbled that they can embarrass Google’s near-divine omniscience. “How to hold on,” “How to heal,” and “How to maintain mental health” are all among the top searches of 2021, never more so than in the past. The discourse about the effects of the pandemic on each of us’ emotional stability won’t be clarified through a series-of-words-divided-by-translations, but 2021 has opened up a new dialogue, evidenced by examples like those of sportswomen Naomi Ōsaka and Simone Biles and complemented by Year in Search.
2021 is the year we discovered we didn’t know how to do anything, trying to collect, by flapping our fingers on the screen, something that seemed to have been taken away from us in previous months. According to Google, this year we didn’t type questions but affirmations, we should-know-things, and it’s preferable that we see in this war on passivity a glass half full. We wanted to be part of the themes, of “sustainability” and “body positivity,” both of which were searched for more than at any time in the past. The video published by Google resizes any intention to see, in our whim of wanting to know everything, selfishness and impatience, showing rather doubts for which we have, only, many-research-results.
