The Googlisation of Everything

Milwaukee.
The first keynote at AoIR 2009 is by Siva Vaidhyanathan, whose focus is on the Googlisation of everything (aiming low, then...). He begins by noting the largely uncritical veneration of Google and its impact on everyday life; Google is now almost impossible to get by without, which is quite an achievement for a company that is only 11 years old. One particularly notable recent project here is the Google library project which aims to digitise as many extant books as possible; where libraries around the world have for some time explored the possibility of a coordinated worldwide project, Google simply came in and got going with it. Especially troubling in this context is the cost of this to libraries.

At the same time, there was much hype about what an amazing transformation this would be - from the usual suspects like Kevin Kelly, but also from usually cooller minds like Lawrence Lessig. So what is it that makes us love Google so much; what is the 'theology' of Google? How does Google learn from us, what does it get from our use of its services; what are we giving up as we switch to cheaper or free Google products? Why are we so thrilled with the collapse of inconvenience which results from this?

The Googlisation of life, then, is the process of being captured, processed, and rendered by Google: the Googlisation of communication, knowledge, and ultimately us in general. Google's mission is 'to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible' - a stunningly bold claim (universal on two levels: all the world's knowledge, universally accessible) which remains unmatched by virtually any other company. How does this work in practice - is there an overarching understanding of this mission statement? Is Sergey Brin's statement that the perfect search engine would be 'like the mind of god' shared by Google's employees?

Google is omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, or so it seems; we have an almost blind faith in Google as we use it. But how did we all find it? Early adopters found it through services like Slashdot or BoingBoing, and immediately understood how different and how much better it was, compared to the then existing search engines like Yahoo! or Altavista. And the availability of such a tool immediately raises our expectations of what should be possible - we become immune to the rising expectations, cease to be amazed, and instead neatly become frustrated with the limitations of something that not too long ago we didn't even know existed.

Indeed, we are rarely invited to see inside the black box, and Google is just a guilty of hyping expectations of its services as most other technology companies. In this, speed matters more than anything in satisfying user expectations - users respond to speed, and more speed breeds more use (and thus more advertising revenue for Google). Each search on Google fires up between 700 and 1000 machines which provide a result within the minimum amount of time - but users are kept unaware of this.

Google isn't doing anything wrong by doing this, but our faith in Google is dangerous because we are so weak - we are addicted to speed and convenience for the sake of speed and convenience. Immediacy should not be an end in itself, and immediacy draped in a cloak of corporate benevolence is bad faith. Google makes much of this attitude of benevolence (through its 'don't be evil' motto); it goes to great lenghts to explain the implications of this motto, but ignores a number of legitimate challenges to its status as a benevolent entity. This is because the burden of possible harms which can be done using its services is too substantial to excuse.

That said, if we expect it to do so much for is, we should not expect it to do no harm - we are as culpable as Google in this context. We should not pretend that our consumer choices make the slightest difference in the world - a belief in corporate responsibility it just makes us feel better. Instead, we must push for legislation to enshrine such responsibility - but we have failed at politics for the past 30 years, Siva says.

Google is guilty of a technofundamentalist hybris, however - its belief in the ability of technology to solve all human problems is not sustainable, and lures us into a false belief in technology as well. 'Don't be evil' is hybristic, and ultimately futile; companies should do what companies do, within the bounds of law and policy, and if we don't like what they do, we need to push for new laws and new policy.

Google Websearch claims comprehensiveness for its search results, and precision for its top-ranked pages; this order may be different tomorrow, or in a different city, but is still trusted by Google's users at any one time - they exhibit a trust bias, and an overconfidence in their own ability to use the search engine (a large number of users don't even know the difference between regular and sponsored links). And as we use the search engine, we affect the results returned to the next user - Google is inherently conservative, and creates a self-reinforcing cycle in which winners (top-ranked results) keep winning. This is about a pragmatic form of truth, which works in the world but remains under constant pressure of verification and redefinition.

But we cannot let the contention stand that hyperlinks are created neutrally - links may imply affirmation or derision, or be purely functional, and not every page creator may use links in the same fashion. Google favours tech-savvy interests, for example, and the local matters more than the global - this undermines the idea of universality, of course. And occasionally, Google staff intervene in the search results - by editorially addressing 'undesirable' results, for example.

Google has recently invited reporters to observe the quality control team at work, in fact, but what is considered to be 'quality' remains an open question. This is especially notable in the context of Book Search, which doesn't track incoming links, so it remains unclear why one book is ranked above another. But none of this should be seen mainly as a criticism of Google; importantly, this is also about the lack of critical understanding on part of Google's users.

Ken Hillis now responds to this, but I'm not sure I have the concentration to follow this in detail - still feeling too sick, and the Crystal Ballroom here is both opulent and very, very cold.

Technorati : AoIR 2009, Google, belief, neutrality, search, trust, users
Del.icio.us : AoIR 2009, Google, belief, neutrality, search, trust, users