“Mom, how are babies made?”. Goodbye stork, now the answer is given directly by Google, which replaces the parents and is chosen by the under 15s for the first notions of "general culture". This was revealed by a study conducted by Birmingham Science City, according to which 54% of children aged between 6 and 15 prefer to go directly to the search engine on the internet, when they have a doubt on any topic, rather than asking their mum or dad (only in 26% of cases).
Not only that: Google is considered faster, more private but also more reliable, given that over a third of the children interviewed believe that their parents are unable to help them, and 14% even go so far as to think that their mother and father are not intelligent enough. Not to mention teachers: only 3% of children turn to them.
“It's the Google Generation – explains Pam Waddell, director of Birmingham Science City -: a quarter of the very young people in today's world do not even know what an encyclopaedia is”. Or, even more chilling, 10% think it's a kitchen or medical appliance. Google has become everything: library, encyclopedia and even parent.
