The googlization of ever.., p.18
The Googlization of Everything, page 18
Perhaps Google does better in countries with more internal linguistic diversity. The United States, which is largely monolingual (although Spanish is America’s second language), gives Google only about 72 percent of its Web-search business—although this number has been climbing steadily since 2005. Google does slightly better in bilingual Canada, with 78 percent of the market. India, the most multilingual of major economic powers (with twenty-one major languages in use), is a much better market for Google, with more than 81 percent of the search market.75
Many of the searches in India are done in English, which is the standard language of commerce across the country of more than a billion people—more than 17 percent of the world’s population. Unlike Korea, where mastery of one script and one language has been the key to success for Naver.com, India offers Google an ideal environment to demonstrate its flexibility, adaptability, and computational power. Google has invested much in automatic translation within and among Indian languages. As of mid-2009, Google offered its service in nine of India’s languages: Hindi, Bengali, Telegu, Marathi, Tamil, Gujurati, Kannada, Malayalam, and Punjabi. Although India is a major high-technology incubator, its software engineers have yet to produce an effective local search engine that does anything more than mimic Google’s look and feel.76
LOCAL CULTURE AND THE RESISTANCE TO COSMOPOLITANISM
Although the Internet may have great potential to unite the world, it has done so unevenly over the past twenty years. Rather than act as a membrane that connects everyone with everyone and everyone with every piece of knowledge equally, the Internet allows for punctuated connections. It succeeds best at uniting diasporic communities and at forging political alliances both within and across borders. Google’s role in these phenomena has been anything but simple. In its search functions, Google has increased the “tribalization” of the Web, letting Dutch football fans and people of Maori descent find each other and reinforce their shared opinions. It fractures the world in new ways even as it unites it in other new ways. One aspect of global civil society, what we might call “local-culture movements,” has benefited greatly from this simultaneous aggregation and disaggregation of people and places. It demonstrates how global civil society and the potential global public sphere conflict rather than cohere.
Local-culture movements have little use for the global public sphere. In fact, they see it as a problem. These movements represent the interests of long-marginalized culture groups, particularly those that have struggled to assert and maintain identities under intense pressure from illiberal, authoritarian, or totalitarian nation-states intent on eliding difference for the sake of a forged and coerced nationalism. Under these conditions, many of these culture groups were unable to transmit their traditions openly or teach their languages to their young members. For example, both Spain and France have sought to suppress the culture and language of the Basque country, which straddles their border. The Internet has allowed Basque nationalism to reassert itself, making connections between members of the Basque diaspora worldwide; disseminating Euskara, the ancient Basque language; and extending the concept of Basque identity to those who would embrace it via the Web, regardless of their actual ancestry.77 Similar local-culture movements have flourished in places such as Wales and Cornwall.
However, because globalization has allowed the resurgence of such movements in many places (including generally liberal states such as Australia and Canada), these culture groups face a new threat: the corporate exploitation of their signs, stories, and cultural practices. In this view, a public sphere is merely an opportunity for others to cheapen their experiences, traditions, and beliefs by rapid repetition and distribution in new and often insulting contexts.78 The local-culture movement thus opposes the torrent of proprietary media images and texts that pour out of multinational corporations via closed networks of satellite, cable, broadcast, and retail outlets.79
The tension between the very liberal Web movements and more communitarian local-culture movements exposes the frustrations and limitations of efforts to generate a global public sphere that can wrestle with cultural, trade, health, or environmental questions. The public sphere in Habermas’s model mediates between the private and the state. However, although local and even individual interests clearly can find expression on the Web, rarely does any supranational body have effective sovereignty over any global issue. Sometimes the World Trade Organization seems able to enforce its agenda, but its actions might just be a mask for the interests of a particular nation-state. At other times, UNESCO and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) may seem to have authority in their respective areas of concern. But again, such organizations might just be acting as instruments of a nation-state seeking multilateral cover. Moreover, public spheres imply and perhaps require real, physical spaces for deliberation and debate.
The very marginality of a local-culture movement—its reason for being—renders it peripheral to global discussions of cultural policy. Only when represented by a friendly and supportive nation-state (again, such as Canada or Australia) do members of local-culture movements find their claims considered by policymaking officials. But this is action driven by the state, not by a global public sphere.80
The Internet does not in itself provide the social space or norms that Habermas describes and prescribes for a healthy public sphere. It is not designed to be a force for civility. Paradoxically, the Internet does a better job of stimulating (or simulating) rational spaces and norms in illiberal contexts, as when it is employed by democratic dissident movements.81 Much Internet-mediated global political action is markedly uncivil. On the margins, “hactivism” (using disruptive communicative technology toward political ends) and cybervandalism have become important tools for the disaffected (including members of local-culture movements).82 The Internet is not enough. Perhaps some technology applied to the Internet—a filter such as Google, for instance—could “civilize” the networks.
For a time, Google appeared to offer uniformity and consistency of experience in the use of the Web, lending weight to the notion that technology could unite and connect people everywhere. By basing its search results on consensus choices, it promised to filter out the marginal and to contribute to the stability and universality of knowledge on the Web. But, as we have seen, recent moves to localize and customize search results have undermined that potential. And we now understand that the very nature of Google’s search algorithms privilege highly organized, technologically savvy groups over others. Google in fact disrupts the prospects of building a global public sphere.
To understand why such disruptive behavior remains important in global politics, we must consider the peculiar role of culture in the postmodern global market economy. Culture is contentious. Seyla Benhabib argues that “culture” has traditionally been considered central to the maintenance of worldviews of dominant political structures, not a distinct field or locus of symbolic generation and differentiation. The distinction of “culture” from the regimentation and reification of science, politics, economics, or militarism is a distinctly modern phenomenon, the result of a process that Max Weber called Wertausdifferenzierung, or “value differentiation.” Weber claimed that culture under the modern state and capitalist economy tends to foster oppositional poses as much as legitimizing ones. Under the political canopy of the twentieth-century industrial and welfare state, cultural politics was merely an adjunct to questions of resource distribution, but calling for resource distribution in a neoliberal context seems futile and is dismissed as counterproductive. Consequently, in recent years, Benhabib explains, cultural groups have been employing political strategies to assert recognition, rather than redistribution, although there can be redistributive consequences of cultural recognition.83 In a desperate, divided, Darwinian world economy, cultural recognition can seem as important as life itself.84 Attempts at forging a global public sphere discount the importance of cultural recognition in favor of procedural equality. Not that there is anything wrong with that; but failing to consider the visceral power of specific cultural claims is likely to exclude and alienate much of the postcolonial world.
With its powerful trends toward localization in search results and thus the customization of knowledge, Google’s search functions actually reinforce the interests of the local-culture movements and thus inhibit rather than further the expansion of a genuine global civil society. However, several major aspects of Google’s business have influenced the expansion of global civil society in its present form and have offered a glimpse of what a global public sphere might look like: YouTube, Blogger, and Google News. These are some of the main factors in the Googlization of the world. If the development of a global public sphere is a good thing and a goal to be pursued—and despite the obstacles to such a development that I’ve been analyzing, there are people and forces that would assert that it is—we need to ponder ways in which we can influence the Googlization of the world to achieve that end. One way to do that is to analyze further another major aspect of the Googlization of everything: the Googlization of knowledge.
FIVE
THE GOOGLIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE
THE FUTURE OF BOOKS
Those of us who take liberalism and Enlightenment values seriously often quote Sir Francis Bacon’s aphorism that “knowledge is power.” But, as the historian Stephen Gaukroger argues, this is not a claim about knowledge: it is a claim about power. “Knowledge plays a hitherto unrecognized role in power,” Gaukroger writes. “The model is not Plato but Machiavelli.”1 Knowledge, in other words, is an instrument of the powerful. Access to knowledge gives access to that instrument of power, but merely having knowledge or using it does not automatically confer power. The powerful always have the ways and means to use knowledge toward their own ends.
However, expanding access to knowledge brings more people with more and different ends into the space where those ends can be made known, be advocated, and take their place on the agendas of nations and transnational movements alike. Indeed, advocates for increased access to knowledge have put that issue itself on the international agenda regarding questions ranging from access to patent medicines to access to proprietary software. The issue of access to knowledge is thus central to the prospects for expanding the public sphere and thereby contesting the claims of the powerful to all the instruments of power.
Much of human knowledge exists in the form of long arrays of text, what we still call books. We are dazzled and distracted by the new methods of transmitting and using this knowledge, but most of the best expressions of deep human thinking still rest on paper, bound with glue, nestled and protected by cloth covers, on the shelves of libraries around the world. How can we simultaneously preserve and extend that knowledge? How can we vet and judge its utility and truth? How can we connect the most people with the best knowledge? Google, of course, offers some answers to those questions. It’s up to us to decide whether Google’s answers are good enough.
SHUFFLING THE PAGES
In May 2006, the Wired magazine contributor Kevin Kelly published in the New York Times Magazine his predictive account of flux and change in the book-publishing world. That article outlined what he claimed “will” (not “might” or “could”) happen to the book business and the practices of writing and reading under a new regime fostered by Google’s plan to scan millions of books from university and public libraries and offer searchable texts to Internet users. “So what happens when all the books in the world become a single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas?” Kelly wrote. “First, works on the margins of popularity will find a small audience larger than the near-zero audience they usually have now…. Second, the universal library will deepen our grasp of history, as every original document in the course of civilization is scanned and cross-linked. Third, the universal library of all books will cultivate a new sense of authority.”2
Kelly suggested that the linkages of text to text, book to book, page to page, and passage to passage will fill the knowledge gaps that have made certain people winners and others losers. “If you can truly incorporate all texts—past and present, multilingual—on a particular subject,” he wrote, “then you can have a clearer sense of what we as a civilization, a species, do know and don’t know. The white spaces of our collective ignorance are highlighted, while the golden peaks of our knowledge are drawn with completeness. This degree of authority is only rarely achieved in scholarship today, but it will become routine.”3
Such heady predictions of technological revolution have become so common, so accepted in our techno-fundamentalist culture, that even when John Updike criticized Kelly’s vision in an essay published a month later in the New York Times Book Review, he did not doubt that it would someday come to pass. Updike just lamented the change, musing about how wonderful his old bookstore haunts were for him and everyone else who strolled the streets of New York, Oxford, and Boston in the 1950s.4 His elitist comments served only to bolster the democratic credentials of Kelly and others who have been asserting that Google’s plan to scan millions of books would spread knowledge to those not as lucky as Updike.
As it turns out, universal access to book knowledge is proving not so easy to accomplish. Kelly’s predictions depend, of course, on the cooperation of one part of the system that he slights in his article: the copyright system. He mentions copyright as a mere nuisance: to acknowledge that a system built by lawyers might defeat one built by engineers would have run counter to his vision. In fact, when he wrote his article, it seemed entirely possible that the current American copyright system would crush Google’s plan to scan the entire collections of dozens of university libraries.
THE GOOGLIZATION OF BOOKS
For several years, Kelly’s vision for a universal digital library seemed to be approaching realization through a project known at different times as Google Print, Google Book Search, and Google Books. The project foundered and then apparently recovered, thanks to the legal settlement that Google reached in October 2008 with the Association of American Publishers and the Authors’ Guild. That settlement came after four years of argument over what copyright would look like in a digital age. It dodged the legal and philosophical questions at the heart of the dispute, and it proposed a bold new system for book research and distribution that, instead of promoting access to knowledge, raised even more questions: the lack of competition, increased monopolization, and the increasing privatization of the information ecosystem.5
In 2004, Google began scanning and indexing millions of books from more than twenty-five university libraries. This service has been the subject of much hyperbolic speculation. On first learning of Google’s plans, legal scholars such as Lawrence Lessig claimed that they would radically democratize information for the public, not just for academics. Authors such as Cory Doctorow initially applauded Google Books for offering ways to connect interested readers to particular texts and thus prevent small books from getting lost in the mass market. And techno-libertarians such as Kelly celebrated the transformative nature of electronic texts, arguing that Google Books would allow users to connect disparate pieces of information as they saw fit, thus evading the tyranny of the book cover and library catalog. These were expressions by true believers in the potential of digital culture—when properly supported by a benevolent force such as Google—to transform, extend, and democratize knowledge. Publishers and authors, meanwhile, took a less rosy view, and two high-profile lawsuits were initiated against the program for copyright infringement.
Google Book service has failed to live up to any of the exaggerated claims that its early proponents made for it. Not only has it failed to deliver on its promises, but along the way it has disrupted the copyright system and the economy of publishing. Google had hoped to take the modes and standards of Web copyright practice and apply them to books in the real world, where they do not fit. Once people discovered the contours and details of the settlement proposal engineered by publishers’ lawyers and Google in the fall of 2008, they saw some big problems. Copyright and cyberlaw professors who had cheered Google’s bold embrace of the principle of fair use of copyrighted material realized that Google had actually designed a system that would give it important competitive advantages, making it too powerful within the economy and culture of books.6 When it was first announced, the Harvard law professor and copyright reform advocate Lawrence Lessig called the settlement “a good deal that could be the basis for something really fantastic.”7 But after considering all the debates and issues surrounding the settlement and Google’s plans, Lessig soon concluded that the settlement would not only fail to loosen up American copyright law but might even restrict and commercialize the flow of digital knowledge, and he withdrew his support for the project.8
More significantly, the head of one of the original Google library partners, Harvard University Libraries, publicly declared that he opposed the project. The historian Robert Darnton had been a professor at Princeton University when Harvard entered its partnership with Google. Once he became head of the libraries at Harvard, he began to question whether it was in the best interest of the university to contribute to the privatization of knowledge through Google. In February 2009, Darnton published an influuential article in the New York Review of Books in which he declared Google’s efforts to control so much of our historical heritage a danger to the future of learning.9
