The googlization of ever.., p.24
The Googlization of Everything, page 24
Cloud computing and massive, distributed computation have already been declared the next great intellectual revolution by Wired magazine, which prides itself on predicting such trends. Its editor, Chris Anderson, wrote in June 2008 that the ability to collect and analyze almost unimaginable collections of data renders the standard scientific process of hypothesis, data collection, testing, revision, publication, and further revision almost obsolete. Anderson wrote:
Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.… At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later. For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn’t pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising—it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right.40
Needless to say, Anderson’s techno-fundamentalist hyperbole belies a vested interest in the narrative of the revolutionary and transformational power of computing. But here Anderson has stepped out even beyond the pop sociology and economics that usually dominate the magazine. Anderson claims “correlation is enough.”41 In other words, the entire process of generating scientific (or, for that matter, social-scientific) theories and modestly limiting claims to correlation without causation is obsolete and quaint: given enough data and enough computing power, you can draw strong enough correlations to claim with confidence that what you have discovered is indisputably true.
The risk here is more than one of intellectual hubris: the academy has no dearth of that. Given the passionate promotion of such computational models for science of all types, we run the risk of diverting precious research funding and initiatives away from the hard, expensive, painstaking laboratory science that has worked so brilliantly for three centuries. Already, major university administrations are pushing to shift resources away from lab space and toward server space. The knowledge generated by massive servers and powerful computers will certainly be significant and valuable—potentially revolutionary. But it should not come at the expense of tried-and-true methods of discovery that lack the sexiness of support from Google and an endorsement from Wired.
HOW SHOULD UNIVERSITIES MANAGE GOOGLE?
As Google has assumed a progressively greater role in the way that students, faculty, and university administrations pursue knowledge, the company has been calling the shots. Every few months, it seems, it approaches universities with a new initiative that promises stunning returns for the academic equivalent of no money down. Since 2006, for example, Google has been competing with Microsoft and Yahoo to take over university e-mail services, thus locking in students as lifetime Gmail users and allowing the company to mine the content of their e-mail for clues about consumer preferences and techniques for targeting advertisements.42 The potential of relieving the university of the cost of running e-mail servers and being able to eliminate storage-space restrictions for users is almost too attractive to pass up.
What can and should universities do about these issues? For the answer to that, as for the answer to what we can do about the Googlization of knowledge in general, the Googlization of us, and the Googlization of the world, we need to take a step back and return to considering the prospects for the creation and maintenance of a vital public sphere in a globalized digital age. We should be wary. We should not let one rich, powerful company set the research and spending agenda for the academy at large simply because we—unlike Google—are strapped for cash. The long-term costs and benefits should dominate the conversation. We should not jump at the promise of quick returns or even quick relief. The story of Google’s relationship with universities is not unlike the tragedy of Oedipus. Since its birth, Google, overflowing with pride, has been seducing its alma mater—the academy. If Google is the lens through which we see the world, we all might be cursed to wander the earth, blinded by ambition.
CONCLUSION
THE HUMAN KNOWLEDGE PROJECT
In his 1941 short story “The Library of Babel,” Jorge Luis Borges describes a universe structured in the form of a library. It is constructed of an infinite number of hexagonal cells. Each cell contains four walls of books arranged at random, with no stable indexing system to guide readers to the valuable or useful ones. Most of the books on the shelves are unreadable. Either they are full of nonsense words and letters, or they are meaningful but in code. But because the library is infinite, by definition it must contain every possible piece of knowledge. infinite random occurrences of text and symbols should produce poetry, biography, history, and mystery. In addition, every book must necessarily be translated perfectly and in every language somewhere in the stacks and cells. As with his story about Funes, Borges makes the point that amassing vast, infinite collections of information ultimately gets us no closer to wisdom. Even the librarians in the Library of Babel are driven insane by the prospect of perfect, complete knowledge that is frustrated by their inability to navigate the system. They come to believe that somewhere in the library a catalog must exist among the books themselves. After all, if every other possible book must necessarily exist, so must the catalog. The master of this catalog is a mythical figure known as the “Book-Man.” The story unfolds with the logical, systematic, and ultimately destructive search for the Book-Man and the catalog of all knowledge. In the Library of Babel, the Book-Man is a myth, a dangerous object of veneration. In our lives, Google is fast assuming the role of Book-Man.1
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal in August 2010, Google’s chief executive officer, Eric Schmidt, made a startling claim about the relationship among people who use Google, the company’s search services, and the real world itself. “I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” Schmidt said. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.… We know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are.”2 Google, in other words, was moving quickly from a service through which people found information online to one in which it served as an embedded guide to navigating choices, associations, tastes, and the world around us. This means that Google, the most flexible yet powerful information filter we use regularly, could come to exercise inordinate influence over our decisions and values. It would be so closely tailored to reflect the choices we had already made that it could reliably predict how to satiate our established desires. Google would go beyond being Borges’s Book-Man: it would be the World-Man. Everything would be Googlized.
IMAGINING A BETTER WAY
To have a healthy global public culture, members of the public must be able to share reliable information about matters of shared concern. Individuals and groups should be able to connect, converse, and collaborate humanistically and humbly. Changes in the economies of the world, the technologies of delivery and exploration, and the role of established institutions have all put new pressures on the public sphere. Google is but one actor in that global ecosystem. It’s a central actor, to be sure. It increasingly structures and orders the sources of knowledge and the behavior of people and institutions that use Google. Historically, we have used newspapers, books, and other vessels of knowledge to feed the public sphere. These days, commercial support for journalism and nonfiction book publishing is eroding. As the information ecosystem we have grown accustomed to over the past fifty years dries and crumbles, we owe it to ourselves to invest in and support an environment that will enable experimentation and the emergence of new institutions and voices that can foster local republican values and global democratic culture.
The Internet has been remarkably effective as a medium for distributing materials cheaply and quickly and—to a lesser extent—fostering serious discussion and profound creativity. It’s only common sense that we should support policies meant to foster innovation and the cheap, easy acquisition of knowledge. What that infrastructure should look like, however, and how we can achieve it, are questions we need to consider very seriously. Given the Googlization of everything that I’ve explored in these pages, one of the principal issues we need to consider is the role that Google plays in promoting or preventing the development of a vital global network that increases access to knowledge. The question is not whether Google treats us well but whether this is best we can do. Is the system, as Google has designed and governed it, ideal for all parts of the world and all segments of society? Is it durable and extensible over the long term? Will it let us both preserve and create? Will it let us filter wisely and connect widely?
We may be satisfied with, even excited about, the Googlization of everything. But we should realize that Google is not what it used to be. In recent years, the company has made several major shifts in emphasis and practice. In general, where once Google specialized in delivering information to satiate curiosity, now it does so to facilitate consumption. “Search” as a general concept of intellectual query has mutated into a process of “browsing” for goods and services. Where once users were guided to the unfamiliar, now targeted and customized searches are the default, thus driving us toward the familiar and comfortable. Where once the collection of incoming links generated search results (as imperfect as that system was), now Google accepts more human editing and is starting to recognize brands as indicators of quality in search results.3 Google gives content from its partners prominent positions in YouTube and Google Books. Under the terms of its settlement with publishers and the Authors’ Guild, Google Books could essentially operate vending machines in public libraries throughout the United States. And newspapers are pressuring Google to enter some sort of deal to privilege their content over that of more popular aggregators such as Huffington Post.
Over the next decade, Google will change even more significantly. Personnel will come and go. Projects will start up and end. Investors and board members will express satisfaction with some initiatives and disapproval of others. Google’s leaders—Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt—could leave the company because of illness or professional differences. Google might fail to make enough money to cover the costs of its commitments and liabilities. Governments might severely restrict Google’s ability to turn attention into cash or to dominate the search market. Anything is possible. And whereas institutions such as libraries, states, and universities tend to last for centuries, commercial firms rarely make it through one century. Most die or change unrecognizably within their first two decades. Google is halfway to that point. We should not count on the company being the same old Google, or even being around to serve as well as it has done so far, when it lurches through adolescence.
Clearly, we should not trust Google to be the custodian of our most precious cultural and scientific resources. We should not assume that Google, with its focus on delivering what we want—or think we want—will deliver what we actually need. We made a grand mistake over the past few years. We were relieved to have a big, rich, brave company, one that proclaimed it would not “be evil,” to assume responsibility for the digitization and distribution of many of the most precious intellectual and cultural resources our species has produced.
In a sense, we missed an opportunity. About the same time that Google started, we could have coordinated a grand global project, funded by a group of concerned governments and facilitated by the best national libraries, to plan and execute a fifty-year project to connect everybody to everything. At least we could have executed a plan to digitize the major collections of hundred or so major libraries around the world and unify the works under a searchable index. We could have launched something like a “Human Knowledge Project.” Now, a dozen years later, it’s harder to do that. But it’s not impossible. In fact, it’s still necessary if we want to pursue the dream of a vital global public sphere.
The very presence and wealth of Google are the greatest impediments are to such a grand global project. Google not only has been crowding out investment in projects that would run along these lines, but has also been crowding out imagination. Google’s most attractive feature in its efforts to be the chief agent engaged in generating a global universal library is the speed with which it undertakes projects. As Paul Courant, the head of the libraries at the University of Michigan, writes in support of Google’s massive effort to digitize millions of books, “For myself, I’d like to unleash my colleagues and our students on this remarkable resource while I’m still around to see what happens.”4
Google has three key advantages over some nebulous, long-term public initiative. First, it has the computational power to make great strides toward this effort by itself. Second, it has a revenue-generating system that could help to fund such an endeavor and thus save public entities from having to fund it, especially in the midst of a global recession. Third, by amassing the cultural capital for appearing to foster a grand public service, Google has the incentive to continue this project for the foreseeable future. Google’s reputation, so far justified, for building systems that are relatively open and customizable, and for signing nonexclusive contracts to acquire materials, has inoculated it against many concerns about “cornering the market” on knowledge distribution.
Still, it’s important to remember that just because Google behaved a certain way between 1998 and 2008 does not mean it will behave that way for the next ten years. As we have seen, Google is changing its nature already. Moreover, Google offers no guarantees of quality, universality, or openness. Without firm regulations, a truly competitive market, or a competing public project, we have no recourse in the event of substandard performance or malfeasance by the company. If this is such an important mission for our species, is it not important enough to promote, debate, and fund publicly? If it’s not important enough, then fine. Let’s drop the whole idea and allow a fractured, privatized system, with all its inherent inequalities of access, to prevail.
But if we really care enough to dream and work toward a goal of a universally accessible and usable global information ecosystem as the basis for an expanded public sphere, then we should at least muster the political will to pursue it—if not for the sake of the citizens of the future and the system itself, then at least for the sake of politics. After all, ensuring the proper distribution of public goods is what politics is all about.
Fundamentally, we should demand patience, deliberation, and quality over expediency, centralization, and thrift. Leaders of the world might not concur, but I think that the potential of leveling knowledge discrepancies, linking every curious person to quality resources that can help guide us through a complex world, is worth waiting fifty years for and spending millions of dollars to achieve. It’s more important to do it right than to do it fast. It’s more important to have knowledge sources that will work one hundred years from now than to have a collection of poor images that we can see next week. And it’s more important to link poor children in underdeveloped regions with knowledge than to quicken the pace of access for those of us who already live among more information than we could possibly use.
THE HUMAN KNOWLEDGE PROJECT: AN INVITATION
I conclude with an invitation to participate in a project to design an information ecosystem that would outlive Google. This endeavor, which I call the Human Knowledge Project, would identify a series of policy challenges, infrastructure needs, philosophical insights, and technological challenges with a single realizable goal in mind: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible. I am sure Google won’t mind if we copy its mission statement.
Over the next decade, the project would hold a series of meetings to bring together thinkers and designers who can forge a vision and a plan for a just and effective global information ecosystem. I would start small, with a few visionaries mapping out the broad contours of the project. Then I would invite hundreds of interested and talented contributors to work on specific elements of the vision. The Human Knowledge Project should be open, public, global, multilingual, and focused. It should be sensitive to the particular needs of communities of potential knowledge users around the world, yet it should be committed to building a global system that can erase the disparities in knowledge that currently exist between a child growing up in a poor village in South Africa and another growing up in a wealthy city in Canada.
We already have the technologies that can make this happen. What we lack are a legal infrastructure that can let more knowledge flow freely at low or no marginal cost to the user of knowledge, removing impediments such as overly protective and anticompetitive intellectual-property powers; a set of global policies explicitly designed to serve the underserved, closing the digital divide that privileges the wealthy and better educated; a set of protocols or norms that would help us differentiate reliable and useful knowledge from massive distractions and rumor, ending coercive Internet practices that pick winners by favoring some content over others (that is, that violate network neutrality); agreements on technical standards, ensuring the quality and preservation of information worldwide; and a system of global governance, ensuring accountability and transparency throughout the system. These are not easy objectives to achieve. I would anticipate many fights and disagreements about the best way forward. But it’s better to have these things argued in a deliberative forum than decided according to the whims of market forces, technological imperatives, and secretive contracts.
