The World Before Google

Congratulations! You are our one billionth visitor…

Like millions of others before us for the past 4,000 years or so, we made the trip to the Great Pyramids at Giza.

As anyone who has been there can attest, at least these days, the most shocking thing about them, besides their massive size, is the fact that they are pretty much perched on the edge of sprawling Cairo.

From the photo above, it would seem we are in the trackless desert, but turn around, and it’s suburban Cairo right besides the Great Pyramid of Cheops.

Weird.

Weirder still, however, was our trip to the Egyptian Museum. This is the one that houses the finds from The Tomb of Tutenkhamen.

I was prepared for the usual Louvre, Met or British Museum Experience. What we got instead was a kind of dusty, ill-lit, disorganized warehouse of history.  The Museum is a mess.  Filled with what are no doubt fantastic and priceless artifacts from a nation with a history of nearly 9,000 unbroken years – but a real mess never the less.

Apparently there are more than 120,000 pieces in the collection.  The galleries, which appear to have neither been painted nor even swept in the past 100 years or so, can only hold a tiny fraction of these, and even they appear in old wood and glass cases. More often than not, artifacts are simply stacked up in a corner. 90% of them no markings or labels at all, and those that do have bits of type written paper taped to an odd corner with a few lines in Arabic and English.

All in all, the place is a real organizational (and cleaning) disaster.

But walking through unmarked and badly lit and organized galleries, never the less,  filled with priceless treasures, I was more than anything else taken with how Google has so rapidly transformed our expectations for access to information and organization.

Sitting at dinner last night and discussing who exactly Mary, the first daughter of King Henry VIII was with Lisa, it was instinctive to simply pull out the Blackberry and Google the info in a second.

But for most of human history (clearly), our access to and our organization of information was far more akin to our experience in the Museum of Cairo – messy, unorganized, eclectic and unlit.

The government of Egypt has no money to re-organize the museum.  Even if they did charge us $25 each for admission, and then another $25 to see the collection of mummies (worth it! Better than TLC!!), that clearly does not pay for the massive job of re-organizing the collection.

But what is buried (literally) here is a massive amount of information – and what are we in the 21st Century of not an Information Society.

What Egypt should do (IMHO), is cut a deal with Google and have them come in an catalogue, photograph and digitize everything in the museum collection and put it online.

Then, when tourists come to the Museum, they can (for their essentially $50 admission fee), get one of those headset things (or access on an iPhone) to a walking tour of the museum complete with all info in a non-linear collection.  Millions of other could have access without coming to Cairo.  The fees could be split between Google and the Museum – and of course the information is good for at least another 5,000 years, so there’s a real long tail here.

The visit to the Museum was a stark reminder of what the pre-Google world was like, for everything.

Messy.

You may also wonder why I don’t include a photo of the museum I am writing about.

This is because no cameras are allowed in the museum.

When you enter you have to pass through an X-ray machine, which immediately detected my new Leica M9 (surprise Christmas present in England).  Fantastic camera, but with the 28mm lens, about $11,000 worth of gear.

The guards at the Museum, scrupulous in their duties, informed me that I would have to leave the Leica at the ‘Garden House’, where I would receive a chit of paper for the camera, which they would hold for the duration of the visit.

The Garden House made the Museum look like Switzerland.  I have no doubt that I might have turned in the Leica and gotten back a Canon point-and-shoot, or worse.

No, I didn’t want to do that.

“Sorry, you may not enter the Museum with a camera”.

However, it seems that for $20 pressed into the guard’s hand, you may enter the museum with a camera in your jacket pocket, so long as you don’t take it out.

If I can get my Leica into the Museum for $20, I bet Google can get access to the entire collection for slightly more.

But they can afford it.