The Googlization of Everything

Another Chapter: the many voices of Google

2009-06-30T15:09:44Z

The Many Voices of Google The story of Google in China may not be a simple one of censorship and the struggle for liberations. After all, China is hardly the only example of a state effectively censoring Internet traffic and thwarting political dissent. As Internet scholar Rebecca MacKinnon wrote during the June 2009 crackdown on Google and other Internet services in China, "The Internet censorship club is expanding and now includes a growing number of democracies. Legislators are under growing pressure from family groups to 'do something' in the face of all the threats sloshing around the Internet, and the risk of overstepping is high." Germany was considering a national censorship system, through which Internet service providers would be required to block a secret list of sites. Australia and the United Kingdom have for a number of years maintained a similar national censorship list. While none of these states censor as pervasively, disruptively, or effectively as China does, it's clear that China has strong partners in efforts to restrict the use of the Internet for both pornography and politics. In each of these countries, Google follows orders from the state carefully and thus actively (albeit tangentially and grudgingly) participates in the censorship of the Internet. Even in the United States, digital copyright laws have forced Google to aid the Church of Scientology in its efforts to squelch Web critics. In addition, the United States has for a decade been requiring libraries and schools to install Web filter software similar to the "Green Dam" mandate in China for the same overt reason: to restrict access to sites suspected of supplying pornography. However, as with Green Dam, such software also restricts material of political significance. Measuring by scale or effect, it's improper to compare the Chinese efforts to restrict the flow of information with that of the United States and other democracies. But it's a mistake to single out China as the only significant place where Web censorship is a matter of policy. The struggle to speak freely on the global network of networks does illustrate the daunting challenges of forging a "global civil society," or a media environment in which citizens around the world may organize, communicate, and participate openly and equally by discovering and using reliable knowledge. As communicative and transportation technologies have connected people in more efficient ways over the past three decades, we have seen the rise in importance of organizations and social networks that work outside of state control to do work across borders. A list of paradigmatic "civil society" organizations would include Amnesty International, OxFam, Falun Gong, the Catholic Church, the International Olympic Committee, FIFA, and the International Red Cross. "Civil Society" is a messy construct. Political theorist John Keane defines global civil society as "a vast, interconnected and multi-layered non-governmental space that comprises many hundreds of thousands of self-directing institutions and ways of life that generate global effects." Certainly, global civil society exists. Elements of it are divergently global, civil, and societal. And most of these institutions predate the Web. An ideal global civil society, which is different from the actual civil society we have now, would foster a cosmopolitan sense of identity and a commitment to the common good of the whole planet. So the question at hand is how Google helps maintain and extend the workings of global civil society. Molding a Public Sphere out of the Internet Forging a "global public sphere" is a much more daunting challenge that an already existing global civil society. We have never really had one. But we might want to create one. Much of what we treasure about living in relatively liberal societies - broad freedoms of consciousness, belief, and associations - could only be guaranteed globally if we could generate a way that all the world's people could use their voice and influence the qualities of their lives. According to German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, early examples of "public spheres" emerged in Europe soon after the rise of nation-states and a commercial middle class in the 18th century. A "public sphere," according to Habermas, is "a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed. Access is guaranteed to all citizens. A portion of the public sphere comes into being in every conversation in which private individuals assemble to form a public body." The tragedy of the public sphere, Habermas argues, is that its core institutions such as newspapers and later broadcasting became so rampantly commercialized in the 19th and 20th centuries that it failed to support the goals of keeping a republic informed and engaged. When it comes to the Web and the influence of Google on the Web, we can see a laboratory experiment in which Habermas' story unfolded in very short time. The global network of networks that former U.S. President George W. Bush calls "the Internets" represents the first major communicative revolution since the publication in 1962 of Habermas' influential historical work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Habermas described a moment in the social and political history of Europe in which a rising bourgeoisies was able to gather in salons and cafes to discuss matters of public concern. The public sphere represented a set of sites and conventions in the 18th century in which (almost exclusively male) members of the bourgeoisies could forge a third space to mediate between domestic concerns and matters of state. It was a social phenomenon assisted by a communicative development: the spread of literacy and the rise of cheap printing in Europe. Habermas asserts that such a space had not existed in Europe in a strong form before the 18th century and that by the end of the 19th century it quickly underwent some profound changes. The democratic revolutions in the United States and France, parliamentary reform efforts in England, and the unsteady lurches toward republics in Germany and other parts of Europe eventually codified many of the democratic aspirations of the public sphere: openness, inclusiveness, and fairness. And by the dawn of the 20th century, the corporatization of communicative functions across nation states had drained the bourgeois public sphere of its deliberative potential and much of its purpose. Habermas left those of us who worry about the health of democratic practice with a nostalgic model of rational discourse with liberatory potential. It's been a powerful and useful model. Since 1962 in Europe and 1989 in the United States (the date of publication for the English translation of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere) Habermasian standards have influenced media reform efforts and - to a much lesser extent - media policy. Long exhausted by trying to rebuild the Hellenic Agora, we set about trying to build a better coffee house. It's not surprise, then, that as soon as the Internet entered public consciousness in the 1990s cultural and communication theorists started asking whether the Internet would enable the generation of a "global public sphere." Influenced perhaps too much from Marshall McLuhan's model of a "global village," scholars, journalists, and activists drove Habermasian terms into mainstream discussions of Internet policy and its political potential. Alas, the Public Sphere is not the best model to idealize when we think globally and dream democratically. Habermas' Public Sphere is as temporally and geographically specific as Benedict Anderson's notion of "imagined communities," and similarly has been inflated to cover disparate experiences that don't precisely map to the specific historical experience the original work covers. In Habermas' story of the emergence and deflation of the public sphere, both nationalism (with the rise of the nation-state) and capitalism play a major role. Concern for the fate of the nation or local affairs drove people to assemble and deliberate. A global public sphere, however, is necessarily cosmopolitan in temperament. Therefore, members of a global public sphere must culturally cohere in some way. Either they must share a language or they must share a value system and a common notion of truth and validity. We are far from having such a system and it's not clear that it's in everyone's interest to generate one. To consider the prospects for a cosmopolitan "global civil society" or its cousin, a "global public sphere" and the role Google might play in it, we should consider the role of powerful and flexible communicative technologies in places as dynamic and diverse as China, Russia, and India. It also allows us to assess how much Google has merged with the Internet in general. Does Google Unite or Divide? Despite its global and universalizing ambitions and cosmopolitan outlook, Google's search functions are not effectively connecting and unifying a diverse world of Web users. Instead it is customizing its services and search results so carefully that it reinforces the patchwork of knowledge that has marked global consciousness for centuries. Over time, as users in a diverse array of countries train Google's algorithms to respond to specialized queries with localized results, each place in the world will have a different list of what is important, true, or "relevant" corresponding to each query. Already, a search done using the Indian version of Google, Google.in, while seated at a computer in Charlottesville, Virginia generates a different set of search results than the same search run in New Delhi, India. Google knows the general location of the searcher, so the results are structured to reflect the habits expressed by others in that place. As Google continues to strive toward localizing, personalizing, and particularizing its services and results, it fractures a sense of common knowledge or common importance. Google might be "organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible," but it is not making universal knowledge universally accessible. Everything might be available to everyone at some time (although we are far from that status and Google is not necessarily contributing to that mission equally across the world), but essential information could be highly ranked on Google searches in Sidney and buried on the ninth page of results in San Paulo. There might even be significant differences in results (and thus effective access to knowledge) between Kiev and St. Petersburg, or Tel Aviv and Hebron. The Languages of Google One exceptional aspect of Google's role in a global context is the automatic translation tool, which enables people to read very rough translations of documents written in other languages. My recent attempt to read the Italian-language book, Luci e Ombre di Google: Futuro e Passato dell'Industria dei Metadati, composed by an Italian collective, was frustrated by the poor quality of Google's translation. But as Google folds more multilingual content into its servers, its translation skills can only improve. As a result, Google has different effects and influence in different parts of the world. So while Google hopes to be universal and universalizing, it actually fractures and severs. The most likely result of the current trends in Web search and Web use would be at least two Webs with very little interaction: one expressed in the Latin alphabet (with English dominating that realm) and another in simple Mandarin (but with as global a reach as the Chinese Diaspora itself). The utility and universality of English on the Web in general has been, according to some scholars, reinforcing its position as the dominant language of commerce in the world. Two factors have complicated this simple story of English linguistic imperialism: The rise of Mandarin as the fastest-growing language area of the Web and the ability of Google to customize, search, and translate elements of the Web into dozens of languages. So the story of the next 10 years of the Web might just be a movement toward at least two dominant languages, but perhaps no domination at all. Google matters most in Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Belgium, and the Netherlands. In each of these nation states Google controls more than 95 percent of the Web search market. Closely behind these leaders are Venezuela, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, France, Finland, Denmark, Columbia, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, and the United Kingdom, all of which give Google between 90 and 95 percent of their Web search traffic, according to various search industry reports in 2009. While examining these countries where Google leads the pack, it's hard to distill commonalities. Most of them use the Latin alphabet. Latvia and Lithuania are Baltic languages, which use a script heavily marked with diacritics and thus differ significantly from the Latin letters of Western Europe. Google does not handle diacritics (or Russian or Hebrew, for that matter) well, so it's surprising some new local search engine has not challenged Google in the Baltics. Still, it's clear that countries that use various Asian syllabic scripts find locally developed search engines better suited for their needs. Google is far behind the local competition in China, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Russia. Each of these nation-states grants Google less than 40 percent of the search market. And each of these countries has major languages that use scripts very different from Latin. Linguistic diversity does not explain everything. As of 2009 most of the major Web search services worked better in English and the languages of Western Europe than they did in other languages. In addition, regardless of the local language of the search engine, the legacy strength of English-language Web sites (that they have been up longer and thus enjoy more incoming links) biases most search engines in favor of English sites. Web search and portal companies certainly understand this. So it's clear that linguistic diversification is central to the success of any Web company. There are also important differences among the non-Latin countries as well. Google actually does worse in Taiwan, with 18 percent, than in mainland China, with just 21 percent of the market. So technologies of censorship might not be the most important factor to searchers. In South Korea, which now has a rich commitment to democracy but strict guidelines about obscenity, Google has only 3 percent of the search market. Naver, the search leader in South Korea, exploits local knowledge generated by generous Web users to tailor search results - sort of a blend of Wikipedia and Google. And the fact that too few Web users use Korean text means that Google's computers have not been able to master the data in Korea the way it has in other parts of the world. Naver got in early to this market in which more than 70 percent of Koreans use high-speed Internet services regularly. So Google has had nothing but trouble and frustration in South Korea. The Korean government has been pressuring Google to adopt a system by which users must identify themselves truthfully when posting videos or comments on YouTube. Google has been limiting access to some services for South Korean users rather than abandon the potential for user anonymity. Google has offered its service in Arabic since 2005, but I have not been able to find any information on its market shares in Arab countries. Google does have offices in Amman, Jordan and Cairo, Egypt. It even offers Gmail to users in Egypt, despite the fact that the Egyptian government is just as aggressive in tracking down, jailing, and torturing political dissidents and critics as China is. Google has not been as public and forthcoming about its concerns for the fate of its users in Egypt as it has in China. And no one in the U.S. Congress or major human rights groups seems to have raised the issue of Google's policies in other oppressive regimes with the vigor of the China question. As Russia has lurched from fragile democracy to nationalist, authoritarian, one-party rule under the direction of Vladimir Putin, Google has found itself able to operate freely within the country. While Putin's regime has stifled (to put it mildly) journalism deemed critical of the government, it has kept the Web relatively open. We often assume that greater Internet use and freedom corresponds with greater political liberty. But in Russia over the past 10 years we have seen a steady rise of Internet use and freedom accompanied by a harsh crackdown on dissent. It's as if the Russian regime understands that the Web is for shopping and whatever political organization might occur over it is a mere nuisance. Despite structural openness of the Russian Internet, Google has not been able to establish a significant or influential share of the search market in the birthplace of co-founder Sergey Brin. Yandex, a Russian company with close connections to the state, had 44 percent of the search market in 2008. Google only had 34 percent of the market. At the time, only about 25 percent of Russians were regular users of the Internet. So the potential for growth and change in that market was significant. Yandex and Rambler, the second-most-popular Russian search engine, have the advantage of being programmed natively in Russian using the Cyrillic alphabet. Yandex specializes in offering Cyrillic-text sites in other languages that Russian users might want to read such as those from Ukraine and Belorussia. Russian grammar is complex and very different than most European languages. Because search techniques now demand complex linguistic analysis, Google's lead in these areas of research among Western European languages gives it no aid in the Russian market. The growth Google has experienced since its debut in Russia in 2006 can be attributed to its influential ancillary services such as YouTube and Google Maps. Still, Yandex controls many of the WiFi access locations and a popular photo sharing site. And in Russian markets, political connections and the support of the state can matter just as much or more than the quality of the service. Because of this complex ecosystem, it's hard to imagine Google prevailing or even growing significantly if Russia becomes even more nationalistic than it already has. If, on the other hand, Russian society and government opens up and liberalizes, one could imagine Google playing and important role in that process. Once again, the conditions on the ground would lead the change in the media environment, rather than the other way. Perhaps Google does better in countries with internal linguistic diversity. The United States is largely monolingual (for now, although Spanish should soon gain status as America's second official language), yet it gives Google 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 poly-lingual of major economic powers, is a much better market for Google, with more than 81 percent of the search market. 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 in 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. So it stands alone as an effective agent to serve the 21 major languages spoken and written in India. As of mid-2009, however, Google only offers its service in nine major Indian languages: Hindi, Bengali, Telegu, Marathi, Tamil, Gujurati, Kannada, Malayalam, and Punjabi. Although India is a major high-technology incubator, it has yet to gestate an effective local search engine that does anything more than mimic Google's look and feel. Local Culture and the resistance to Cosmopolitanism The Internet has great potential to unite the world. But it has done so unevenly at best over the past 20 years. Rather than acting 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, forging political alliances within borders (when the state allows such a thing) and across borders (whether or not states allow it). Google's role in these phenomena has been anything but simple. In its search functions, Google has amplified the "tribalization" of the Web, letting Dutch football fans and people of Maori descent find each other and reinforce their collective judgments. One aspect of global civil society, what we might call the "Local Culture Movement," has benefited greatly from this enhancement. And it demonstrates how global civil society and the potential global public sphere conflict rather than cohere. The Local Culture Movement has no use for the global public sphere. In fact, the global public sphere is a problem for it. This movement represents the interests of long-unrecognized culture groups, many of which 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 postcolonial nationalism. Under these conditions, many of these culture groups were not able to transmit local traditions openly or teach languages to their young members. Since liberalization and globalization replaced fervent postcolonial nationalism in many places (and just as often in already liberal states such as Australia and Canada), these culture groups face a new threat: the corporate exploitation of their signs, stories, and cultural practices. For them, 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. The Local Culture Movement 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. Therefore, both movements could find common cause. One significant limitation to the prospects of a Free Culture-Local Culture alliance is the tone-deafness of much of the U.S.-based rhetoric that serves as the foundation of the Free Culture Movement. Habermas and John Stuart Mill do not always translate well. Yet the tension between the very Habermasian Web movements and the more communitarian Local Culture Movement reveals more than a rhetorical fault. It exposes the frustrations and limitations of efforts to generate a global public sphere that can wrestle with any issue of global importance: cultural, trade, health, or environmental questions. First, it's not always clear what the global public sphere is between. The local (or national) public sphere in Habermas' model mediates between the private and the state. There is rarely a clear state-like supranational body that has effective sovereignty over any particular global issue. Sometimes it might seem to be the World Trade Organization, but that might just be a mask for the interests of a particular nation state. Other times it might seem to be UNESCO or the World Intellectual Property Organization. But again, such organizations might just be acting as an instrument of policy execution at the behest of a nation state that demands the illusion of multilateral cover for its will. Second, public spheres imply (perhaps require) real spaces for deliberation and debate. The very marginality of the 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, Canada or Australia) do Local Culture Movement members find their claims considered by policy-making officials. But this is state-driven action. It's not publicly spherical. While traditional public sphere theory offers little to the Local Culture Movement, civil society more broadly conceived does. This is especially useful because so much Internet-mediated global political action is markedly uncivil. The project should be to encourage civility among all parties without hitching civility to the noxious ideology of "civilizing the uncivilized" parts of the world. More often than not, American and European actors need to be encouraged to behave civilly, whether they are corporations, states, or black bloc anarchists disrupting a meeting of the G-8. On the margins, "Hactivism" and cyber-vandalism have grown into important tools for the disaffected, including members of the Local Culture Movement. The Internet does not in itself provide the social space or norms Habermas describes and prescribes for a healthy public sphere. It is not designed to be a force for the civility. Paradoxically, the Internet does a better job of stimulating (or simulating) rational spaces and norms in illiberal contexts, such as when employed by democratic dissident movements. To understand why uncivil behavior remains important in global politics, we must consider the peculiar role of culture in the postmodern global market economy. Culture is contentious. On its face, this is a rather mundane claim. But it is historically important. Seyla Benhabib argues that "culture" has traditionally been considered central to the maintenance of world-views of dominant political structures, not a distinct field or locus of symbolic generation and differentiation. The distinction of "culture" as a value saved 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 20th century industrial and welfare state, cultural politics was merely an adjunct to questions of resource distribution. Calling for resource distribution in a neoliberal context seems futile and is dismissed as counterproductive. In recent years, Benhabib explains, cultural groups have been employing political strategies in an effort to assert recognition rather than redistribution (although there can be redistributive consequences of cultural recognition). In a desperate, divided, Darwinian world economy, cultural recognition can seem as important as life itself. Cultural humiliation can be considered cause for mass slaughter. Attempts at forging a global public sphere discount the importance of cultural recognition in favor of procedural equality - no that there is anything wrong with that. But those who fail to consider the visceral power of specific cultural claims are destined 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 Movement. However, several major aspects of Google's business has influenced the expansion of global civil society and offered a glimpse of what a global public sphere might look like: the YouTube video service, Blogger, and Google News. These are some of the main characters in the Googlization of communication. ---- Rebecca MacKinnon, "The Green Dam Phenomenon: Governments everywhere are treading on Web freedoms," The Wall Street Jounal Asia, June 18, 2009, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124525992051023961.html. Siva Vaidhyanathan, "Copyright as cudgel," Chronicle of Higher Education (August 2, 2002): B7, http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i47/47b00701.htm. M. Lesk, "Copyright enforcement or censorship: new uses for the DMCA?," Security & Privacy, IEEE 1, no. 2 (2003): 67-69. A broader sense of civil society would include for-profit firms such as Sony Universal, ExxonMobil, or Google itself. We could even construct a list of global "uncivil" society actors that would include Al Queda, organized crime syndicates, and human traffickers. Keane includes commercial actors as elements of global civil society, but I think including them dilutes the analysis of non-commercial actors who forge remarkable connections without compensation. Each set of actors should be considered distinctly first so that we can then examine the effects of one on the other. See John Keane, Global civil society? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 20. Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism : ethics in a world of strangers, 1st ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006). Gillian Brock and Harry Brighouse, The political philosophy of cosmopolitanism (Cambridge ;;New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Martha Nussbaum, The clash within : democracy, religious violence, and India's future (Cambridge Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007). Martha Nussbaum and Joshua Cohen, The clash within : democracy, religious violence, and India's future (Cambridge Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007). Jürgen Habermas, The structural transformation of the public sphere : an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). Jürgen Habermas, "The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article," in Media and cultural studies : keyworks, ed. Meenakshi Durham and Douglas Kellner, 2nd ed. (Malden Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 102-107. Jürgen Habermas, The structural transformation of the public sphere : an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). I use the word "revolution" cautiously. It is far too early in the 20-year history of the Internet to assess its effects in a balanced and sober manner. Hype and fear still dominate the discussions of the effects of the Internet on culture, societies, politics, and economics. In addition, the Internet hype may have distracted scholars from another revolution. I believe that the proliferation of the magnetic cassette tape and player in the 1970s has had a more profound effect on daily life in all corners of the Earth than the Internet has so far. See Peter Lamarche Manuel, Cassette Culture : Popular Music and Technology in North India, Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996). This work extends and revises the work Habermas initiated in the 1960s, before he took his "linguistic turn" into considerations of communicative competence in the 1970s. See Jürgen Habermas, A Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols., vol. I (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984). Also see Douglas Kellner, Habermas, the Public Sphere, and Democracy: A Critical Intervention ([cited March 27 2005]); available from http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/habermas.htm. For critical perspectives on Habermas and public sphere theory, see Craig J. Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), Bruce Robbins and Social Text Collective., The Phantom Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Marshall McLuhan, The global village : transformations in world life and media in the 21st century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Some media theorists like Mark Poster and Jodi Dean are critical of efforts to associate a print-centered nostalgic phenomenon with the cacophony of cultural and political activities in global cyberspace. Others, like Yochai Benkler and Howard Rheingold, see the practice of "peer production" and the emergence of impressive and efficient organizational practices as a sign that Habermas' dream could come true in the form of digital signals and democratic culture. Mark Poster, "The Net as a Public Sphere?," Wired, November 1995. Also see Yochai Benkler, "Freedom of the Commons: A Political Economy of Information," (New York: 2005). Also see Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community : Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, Rev. , 1st MIT Press ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000). Also see Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs : The Next Social Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2002). Also see Craig J. Calhoun, Information Technology and the International Public Sphere [Google cache Web page of unavailable PDF] (Social Science Research Council, 2002 [cited March 27 2005]); available from http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:RGjUwuMc8BwJ:www.ssrc.org/programs/calhoun/publications/infotechandpublicsphere.pdf+global+public+sphere&hl=en&client=safari%20target=nw. Also see Jodi Dean, "Cybersalons and Civil Society: Rethinking the Public Sphere in Transnational Technoculture," Public Culture 13, no. 2 (2001). Also see Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, ed. Manuel Castells, 2nd ed., Information Age ; V. 1 (Oxford ; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000). Law professor Michael Froomkin has argued that the place on the Internet that best exemplifies the Habermasian spirit is in the open generation of the protocols themselves. See A. Michael Froomkin, "Habermas@Discourse. Net: Toward a Critical Theory of Cyberspace," Harvard Law Review 116, no. 3 (January 2003): 749-873, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1342583. Benedict R. O'G Anderson, Imagined Communities : Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Rev. and extended ed. (London ; New York: Verso, 1991). Ippolita Collective, "The Dark Side of Google," Ippolita.net, 2007, http://ippolita.net/google. Madelyn Flammia and Carol Saunders, "Language as power on the Internet," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 58, no. 12 (2007): 1899-1903, http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/asi.20659. "Google's Market Share in Your Country," Google Operating System: Unofficial News and Tips about Google, https://quick-proxy.appspot.com/googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/03/googles-market-share-in-your-country.html. Judit Bar-Ilan and Tatyana Gutman, "How do search engines respond to some non-English queries?," Journal of Information Science 31, no. 1 (February 1, 2005): 13-28, http://jis.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/31/1/13. Liwen Vaughan and Yanjun Zhang, "Equal Representation by Search Engines? A Comparison of Websites across Countries and Domains," Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12, no. 3 (2007), http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue3/vaughan.html. Wingyan Chung, "Web searching in a multilingual world," Commun. ACM 51, no. 5 (2008): 32-40, http://portal.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=1342335&type=html&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=36468138&CFTOKEN=80579826. Fotis Lazarinis et al., "Current research issues and trends in non-English Web searching," Information Retrieval 12, no. 3, 2009: 230-250 "Google's Market Share in Your Country," Google Operating System: Unofficial News and Tips about Google, https://quick-proxy.appspot.com/googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/03/googles-market-share-in-your-country.html. Choe Sang-Hun, "Crowd's wisdom helps South Korean search engine beat Google and Yahoo," The New York Times, July 4, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/04/business/worldbusiness/04iht-naver.1.6482108.html?_r=1. "S. Korea may clash with Google over Internet regulation differences," The Hankyoreh, April 17, 2009, http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_international/350252.html. Kim Tong-hyung, "Google Refuses to Bow to Gov't Pressure," The Korea Times, April 9, 2009, http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/tech/2009/04/133_42874.html. Marcus Alexander, "The Internet and Democratization: The Development of Russian Internet Policy.," Demokratizatsiya 12, no. 4 (Fall2004 2004): 607-627, http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=15579557&site=ehost-live. Ronald Deibert et al., Access denied : the practice and policy of global Internet filtering (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 2008). Jennifer L. Schenker, "Yandex Is Russian for Search--and More," BusinessWeek: Europe, November 29, 2007, http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/nov2007/gb20071129_169273.htm. Jason Bush, "Where Google Isn't Goliath," BusinessWeek: Online Magazine, June 26, 2008, http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_27/b4091060426533.htm. Marcus Alexander, "The Internet and Democratization: The Development of Russian Internet Policy.," Demokratizatsiya 12, no. 4 (Fall2004 2004): 607-627, http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=15579557&site=ehost-live. "Google's Market Share in Your Country," Google Operating System: Unofficial News and Tips about Google, https://quick-proxy.appspot.com/googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/03/googles-market-share-in-your-country.html. Ojas Sharma, "Where is India's Google?," SiliconIndia, May 22, 2009, http://www.siliconindia.com/shownews/Where_is_Indias_Google-nid-56999.html. Rosemary J. Coombe, The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties : Authorship, Appropriation, and the Law, Post-Contemporary Interventions (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), Rosemary J. and Andrew Herman Coombe, "Rhetorical Virtues: Property, Speech, and the Commons on the World Wide Web," Anthropological Quarterly 77, no. 3 (2004), Robyn Kamira, "Indigenous Peoples: Inclusion in the World Summit for the Information Society," (Geneva: World Summit on the Information Summit, 2002), Ian McDonald, "Unesco-Wipo World Forum on the Protection of Folklore: Some Reflections and Reactions," (Redfern: Australian Copyright Council, 1997). Michael F. Brown, Who Owns Local Culture? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003). McDonald, "Unesco-Wipo World Forum on the Protection of Folklore: Some Reflections and Reactions." Coombe, "Rhetorical Virtues: Property, Speech, and the Commons on the World Wide Web." Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Anarchist in the Library : How the Clash between Freedom and Control Is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (New York: Basic Books, 2004). Also see Shanthi and Taylor C. Boas Kalathil, Open Networks, Closed Regimes: The Impact of the Internet on Authoritarian Regimes (Washington, D.C.: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2003). Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas? (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004). Seyla Benhabib, "The Liberal Imagination and the Four Dogmas of Multiculturalism," The Yale Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (1999). 401. Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc. : Inside the Secret World of Osama Bin Laden (New York: Free Press, 2001).

Michael Jackson Died in 2007 : According to Google & Wikipedia

2009-06-29T16:36:54Z

The relationship between the two services is a subject of great interest to me.

Any thoughts on the matter?

Part of my chapter on China and the effects of infotech on oppressive regimes

2009-06-20T16:55:10Z

... The Revolution will not be Faxed When I started to research this book, I assumed I would berate Google for failing to adhere to the highest standards of corporate accountability for consorting with the government of the People's Republic of China and assenting to restrictions on access to certain sites within China. After all, the Tiananmen Square events in May and June of 1989 forged my political consciousness more than any other political event of my life. As journalism scholar Jay Rosen has said, "there are 1945 democrats. There are 1968 democrats. I am a 1989 democrat." I am a 1989 democrat as well. On the same day, June 4, that the Chinese military slaughtered hundreds of peaceful demonstrators in Beijing, the freshly legalized labor union, Solidarity, overthrew the communist government of Poland in a fair election, thus sparking a series of democratic revolutions throughout the world. By October 1989, East German dictator Erik Honecker resigned and Hungary became a republic. By November, the pro-Apartheid National Party in South Africa began dismantling the racist system and inviting full political participation by the oppressed black majority. Also in November 1989, the "Velvet Revolution" began in what was Czechoslovakia and the Communist Party announced it would hold free elections in December. Brazil also held its first free elections that December after 29 years of military rule. The year ended with Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu stepping down and Czech poet Vaclav Havel stepping up to assume the presidency of Czechoslovakia. These and other events contributed to the dissolution of the Soviet empire, and eventually the Soviet Union itself, by late 1991. So in 1989, as a young man of 23, I could not have been more optimistic about the future of my world, my country, and the prospects for justice and democracy. As stories of successful dissidents emerged from the accounts of these revolutions, it became clear that new communication technologies played a part in many of them. The proliferation of fax machines in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, for instance, received much of the credit for facilitating activism and awareness among networks of dissidents. One business writer voiced this commonly held belief by boldly stating, "The fall of Communism in Eastern Europe is the direct result of new information technologies." To a naïve young American such as myself, fascinated by new technology, devoted to the belief that free speech can be deeply and positively transformative, this simple connection between a new technology and stunning historical events was irresistible. Such a techno-optimistic story tracked well with other simplistic accounts I held in my mind at that time: that the Reformation and Enlightenment were "driven," or "made necessary" by the emergence of the printing press in 15th-century Europe; that mass-market pamphlets such as Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" were essential contributions to the birth of the American Republic in the late 18th century. Of course, this was far too simple an explanation for the sudden (and, in many places, temporary) spread of democracy and free speech. Historians of both politics and technology knew the story was more complex than this. But I didn't. I was not wrong to take account of new communicative methods or technologies as factors in rapid social and political change. But as a 23-year-old, I, like many others, put too much emphasis on them and discounted the remarkable human struggle, raw courage, and ideological effort that had a larger effect on the overthrow of oppressive regimes - especially in places such as South Africa and Brazil. Historian Tony Judt, in Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, does not consider new information and communication technologies such as the fax machine central to the story of Eastern European liberation. He credits different key factors in each country of Eastern Europe. In Hungary, Judt explains, a youthful reform movement within the Hungarian Communist Party pushed the government at the weakest points. In East Germany, the decision to alter a very analog technology - the Berlin Wall - and allow Berliners to flow back and forth by late 1989 pushed the Communist Party to the breaking point. All of this local change was aided by a steadily weakened Soviet state. Judt reminds us of the powerfully corrosive influence of the Soviet Unions' folly-filled war in Afghanistan. He shows that it substantially weakening the iron grip the Kremlin had on its European satellites. In addition, change was rapid within Soviet society itself, regardless of the communicative technologies at work. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev invited the growth of a nascent "public sphere," Judt writes, by engaging in "glasnost," or a policy of openness, thus allowing dissent to flow in Soviet society through clubs, meetings, and publications. "Glasnost" even liberalized what appeared on Soviet television - a far more powerful and universal medium than the fax machine. Gorbachev himself decided to break the Communist Party's monopoly on information and narrative, Judt wrote. Once Moscow was weakened, dozens of other factors - including the efforts of labor unions, religious leaders, poets, and criminals - could chip away at the foundation of Communist oppression across the Soviet empire. Judt does confront the most surprising thing about the revolutions of 1989 (in Europe, anyway) and asks why they happened so fast - despite the distinct causes and conditions in each nation. He concludes that communication technology did play a central role in the speed and spread of the revolutionary spirit. But it was not the fax machine that motivated people to rise up: it was television. When viewers in Czechoslovakia and Germany could see their own local uprisings presented on their own televisions in their own living rooms, they encountered what Judt calls "instant political education, drumming home a double message: 'they are powerless,' and 'we did it.' " Just as importantly, Eastern Europeans watched the events in Tiananmen Square unfold along with the rest of the world. They were struck, as I was, by the bravery of the protesters and the brutality of the state. They were no doubt inspired by peaceful revolts that seemed to spring forth all over the world at exactly the same time. The simultaneity of global television gave them both inspiration and a set of models to emulate. For the first time, they knew they were not alone. The lesson here is that by focusing on the novelty of communicative technologies and assuming that their simultaneous arrival in a place causes - rather than coincides or aides - rapid change, we tend to downgrade the importance of something as obvious and powerful as cultural policy, opening a gate, or executing disastrous and debilitating war in Central Asia. The introduction of a powerful and efficient mode of communication, such as the fax machine, can amplify or accelerate a movement as long as that movement already exists - has form and substance. Technologies are, of course, far from neutral. Yet they don't have simple dynamics of "freedom" or "oppression" built into them. The same technologies, as we have already seen, can be used to monitor a group of people and connect them in powerful ways. The way a society or a state uses a technology is as important as the specific design of that technology. So communicative technologies matter to the struggle for freedom, but how and how much? It's important to remember that within any oppressed society, unsettling ideas and criticisms exist and flow, even when impeded by technology and law. They seem and flow through the cracks in the system. And every system has cracks. As Robert Darnton wrote about systems of censorship and their flaws before the French Revolution, "it was not simply a story that pitted liberty against oppression but rather one of complicity and collaboration." ....

This is NOT funny

2009-06-08T21:33:05Z

The Human Element in Google Web Search

2009-06-04T16:00:23Z

Interesting interview about the role of human evaluators in revising search.

Pamela Samuelson on the Google Book Settlement

2009-05-29T00:24:33Z

At UNC:

I'm speaking Friday in NYC at BookExpo America

2009-05-27T19:50:33Z

The 800 Pound Gorillas in the Room - Part 1: Authors & Leaders Speculate on the Future of Google & Author Rights 2:30PM - 3:30PM (Friday, May 29, 2009) Panelist: Paul Aiken - Exec., Dir., The Authors Guild Michael Cader - founder, Publishers Marketplace John Schline - Senior Vice President of Corporate Business Affairs, Penguin USA Siva Vaidhyanathan - author, THE GOOGLIZATION OF EVERYTHING Jeff Jarvis - author, WHAT WOULD GOOGLE DO?

Google Respects Colonel Sanders' Kentucky Fried Privacy

2009-05-25T00:52:25Z

Via Ann Bartow at Madisonian:

Is the Google Book Search project a "privatization" of library resources and functions?

2009-05-24T18:28:38Z

Walt Crawford, who writes a valuable library blog called Walt at Random, took issue with my use of the term "privatization" to describe the Google Book Search project. He wrote a long response to Karen Coyle's criticism of his earlier article on the deal. Here is the response I entered in Walt's comment box: ===== Hi Walt, I just thought I would weigh in on the privatization question. I see that you and Karen are in the midst of a heated argument. I don't need to speak to every point of what seems at this time to be one of diction and manners. I respect both of y'all very much. So I hope I can push the argument beyond its current domain. To be clear: the privatization indictment does not fall on Google. Google is private. It does what is good for it. Google is not the problem here. The privatization accusation is one that bears on the university libraries that have -- for the most part -- given away millions if not billions of dollars worth of collections to a private entity with no clear return and at great risk of liability. The libraries are committing self-privatization. That has two levels: the terms of the original deals with Google and the new vending machine proposal that comes from the settlement. This whole project is gross corporate welfare. The currency at stake is a non-rivalrous good. So it's not like federal subsidies to Agribusiness. It's of a lower scale and stake. But it's welfare nonetheless. The system profits Google and Google alone. The libraries see little or no benefit from the deal. So let me explain what I mean by that. You raised a strong rebuttal: Google as patron. Let's say I walk in to a library. Use the collections. Check books out. Make copies of some of the content. Then I set about creating something new that relies on that content that I sell on the market. That's in fact what I do with the books I write. Good enough. How is Google different? No patron taxes or binds libraries like Google has. First, when I use a library I do not tie up the staff time of dozens of employees for years at a time (at least I hope I don't). This is happening at every Google partner library. I do not make librarians sign non-disclosure agreements that prevent them from discussing the pros, cons, and costs of the my use with the public (or even their own faculty). My use of the library is compensated by the taxpayers of the Commonwealth of Virginia and by the fees my students pay. Google, in contrast, "pays" directly for this windfall through an illegal barter arrangement by which it agrees to make low-quality wholesale copies of millions of books (that Google chooses, thus not necessarily serving the interests of the library). Why is it illegal? Well, because of the un-litigated and thus unsettled copyright infringement issue: Google is transferring copies as payment for a commercial transaction. Nothing in Sec. 107 0r 108 or any case relying on these sections grants a right to make copies of copyrighted works and transfer them as payment. Nothing in the settlement prevents publishers from suing universities if they don't like how universities are using the material. That's such a scary prospect that many Google partners -- including my employer -- have declined to download these images from Google's servers. University lawyers are rightly alarmed at the liability prospects. So for many universities it's worse than a something-for-nothing prospect. It's a loss. They lose staff time, lawyer time, and books from circulation for weeks at a time. Yet they get nothing. Now, I am willing to say at this point that if Hathi Trust flowers into what its visionary leaders predict, I am willing to withdraw many if not all of these concerns. Let's remember that the UC system deal and the Michigan deal are the exceptions within the Google Book Search universe. These universities negotiated better terms for themselves early on. Michigan is still cutting better deals even now (see http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/05/umich-gets-better-deal-in-googles-library-of-the-future-project/) The rest of the libraries are finally coming around to realizing what a bad deal this was for them and the extent to which they were scammed. Harvard did not back out just because Bob Darnton likes the smell of books. He dislikes the smell of the contract he inherited from the Larry Summers regime. I have heard clandestinely that a number of other partners are considering terminating their deals if they are not substantially renegotiated. The second part of the privatization is the vending-machine model of delivery that Google is pushing on libraries through the settlement. Libraries will for the first time have little bookstores inside of them. That's bad enough. But libraries will have no recourse if Google overcharges for the service or (more likely) puts onerous terms on the use of the material. That's blatant privatization of public library space. Now, I'm no purist. And I recognize the value of hot-dog vendors in Central Park. But this has not been part of a process by which the libraries have been invited to the table or been able to stand up for traditional values of librarianship: free and open access; user privacy and confidentiality; preservation; a public space free of commercial influence; etc. So while the word "privatization" is unsubtle and imperfect, it's relevant and important in public discourse about this project that will have tremendous impact on the future of libraries and the public sphere. I use it because I have to pop the bubble of perception that Google works for us. And I use it because I have since 2004 wanted libraries to see that Google does not work for them. Google works for its shareholders -- as it should be. We as citizens and members of the library community have not been as critical or vigilant as we should have been. And sometimes strong words like that serve the purpose of waking people up and pulling them into the conversation. The fact that criticisms of Google Book Search and the settlement have grown louder and wider in recent years is evidence of the value of such tactics. Privatization is not a boolean quality. It has gradations. If I can't convince you to see this massive project of text-giving by public libraries to one of the world's most successful and aggressive corporations as part of the process of privatization, so be it. Brewster, Karen, and I are hardly naive about the steady privatization of library services through expensive vendors etc. Brewster, after all, made his killing through the private sector in the first place. But we all recognize the virtue in minimizing the influence of private interests within and among public institutions -- especially libraries. Oh, and BTW, OCA will not necessarily be around forever. It depends on philanthropy. And philanthropists don't like to duplicate what the private sector is already doing. Moreover, if the settlement goes through OCA will not be able to compete at the level of full-text availability for most of the books of the 20th century. So there is no point even comparing them. And I think we all have to consider the pressures that non-librarian boards and administrators put on libraries to reduce their collections whenever there is a potential "alternative" to the physical item. And Google is just that sort of poor substitute for the original. I wish I were as confident as you that the OCA will be part of the mix 20 years from now. I think a bigger danger, however, is that Google either goes bust or transforms into something very different. What if its board in 2020 decides the book project is a money-loser. What then? These are serious issues, even if you don't want to traffic in terms like "privatization." I know that you get that and I value your contribution to their consideration. So what do you want to see next? What should libraries do in the case the settlement is approved? What should they do if the court rejects the settlement or the Feds pursue anti-trust action against Google? I have some big ideas. I would love to hear yours. ==== UPDATE: Later, in reaction to some comments on Walt's blog, I wrote: ==== I believe Eric has raised a very important point that reflects on a very different notion of "privatization," and that is of policy. There was this problem or challenge: It's safe to say that creating a text-searchable digital index of millions or billions of books, and making them available via the Web would benefit the republic and the planet. Let's just assume that. Given that assumption, what prevented us from doing that? Three things: the concentration and expense of the delivery technology (the Web); the expense of scanning, indexing, maintaining, and supporting the collection (what Google is doing but libraries should have been doing); and changing copyright law to facilitate this scanning under the right conditions. The first challenge took care of itself for most of the United States and Europe -- mostly through libraries. But we still have a long way to go with the rest of the world. The second challenge is being met (poorly, I would say) by Google boldly reaching out and doing it. Whether libraries should have given away their riches to Google was the subject of most of the debate within the library community before the settlement. That third challenge is a doozy. Congress should have decided this issue. I firmly believe that if we want something in this country we should petition the legislature and launch a political movement toward that end. Going to courts to solve the problem is unhealthy and risky. This was one of my main criticisms of the Google project before the settlement. Now, if the settlement prevails, we will see a radical change in the law. Private law is being used to shape public policy over one of the most precious aspects of republican ideology: the incentive system we rely on to fill the public domain with rich texts. This settlement establishes one company as the sole arbiter of a compulsory license over millions of books. It does so through the class-action process. It would establish an elaborate system not unlike ASCAP or BMI, but without the legislative scrutiny, deliberation, and specific exemption from antitrust. This is too important to be left to the discretion of one search engine company, a small group of major publishers, a small group of elite authors, and one federal court in the Southern District of New York. The rest of us should have stake in this process. We do not. We can blog about it all we want but none of the parties cares about our issues and concerns. A handful of private actors are making public policy -- thus privatizing the policy-making system. That's actually a bigger problem than whether the act of capture "privatizes" the library. We can dispose of semantic disagreements. We can't dispose of this rather radical change in how policy is implemented.

Kevin Kelly on the next 5,000 days of the web

2009-05-18T17:38:39Z

Kevin Kelly at TED:

The Googlization of Universities

2009-05-15T21:51:09Z

This is too American in its voice and perspective. Anyone have advice for me? ===================== 4.1 The Googlization of Universities ... The Tangled Relationship The relationship between Google and the universities of the world is more than close. It is uncomfortably familial. In recent years Google has moved to establish, embellish, or replace many core university services such as library databases, search interfaces and email servers. Google's server space and computing power have opened up new avenues for academic research. One experiment, Google Scholar, has allowed non-scholars to discover academic research they might never have stumbled upon. And Google Book Search has radically transformed the both the vision and daily practices of university libraries. Through its voracious efforts to include more of everything under its brand, Google has fostered a more seamless, democratized global, cosmopolitan information ecosystem yet contributed to the steady commercialization of higher education and erosion of standards of information quality. All of this occurred at a time when cost pressures on universities and the students they serve have spiked and public support for universities has waned. Google has capitalized on a "public failure." In contrast to a "market failure," a "public failure" is the phenomenon in which an erosion or retreat of state commitment and resources to a public good or need reveals an opportunity for an ambitious firm to assume control of a service and fold it into a market advantage. Understandably, the ubiquity of Google on campus has generated both opportunity and anxiety. Unfortunately, universities have allowed Google to take the lead and set the terms of the relationship. This chapter argues for a reversal of that trend. Universities must assert their values and interests on Google as the company assumes greater control over many aspects of information distribution. A Common Culture Universities gave birth to Google. So there is a strong cultural affinity between Google corporate culture and that of academia. Founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page met each other while pursuing Ph.D.s in computer science at Stanford University. Page did his undergraduate work at the University of Michigan and retains strong ties with that institution. Many of the most visionary Google employees, such as University of California at Berkeley economist Hal Varian, suspended successful academic careers to join the company. The foundational concept behind Google Web Search, PageRank, emerged from an academic paper that Brin and Page authored together and published in 1999 . So it's not surprising that Google's corporate culture reflects much of the best of academic work life: unstructured work time, horizontal management structures, multidirectional information feedback flows, an altruistic sense of "mission, recreation and physical activity integrated centrally into the "campus", and an alarmingly relaxed dress code. For decades American universities have been instructed to "behave more like businesses." In the case of Google, we see a stunningly successful firm behaving as much like a university as it can afford to behave. Peer review -- the notion that every idea, work, or proposition is contingent, incomplete, and subject to criticism and revision - is the core value that Google incorporated from academia. This devotion to peer review is not particular to Google. All open source or free software projects and much of the proprietary software industry owe their creative successes and quality control systems to the practices of peer review. In fact, the entire Internet is built on technologies that emerged from peer-review processes. But Google, much more than the other major firms engaged in widespread and public distribution of software and information, owes its very existence to an explicit embrace of peer review. Google owes its success to the dominance of its Web search engine and the ability of the company to run simple auctions to place paid advertising spots along the side of seemingly organically generated search results. When you type in "shoe store" to a Google search box, Google's PageRank algorithm sorts through Web pages that contain the phrase "shoe store" and ranks them for you based on the number of other pages that link to those pages. PageRank weights some sources of incoming links higher than others. The result, which takes mere seconds, is a stark list of sources based on relative popularity. Popularity stands in for quality assessment. This is not merely a vulgar, market-based value at work. The same principle guides academic citation review systems. Google's founders where working on citation analysis projects when they came up with the idea of applying such a system to the chaos that was the World Wide Web. Nonetheless, bibliometrics turned out to be a highly effective method of filtering and presenting Web search results. As Harvard Law professor Yochai Benkler explains, Google assumed the role as the market leader among search engines by outsourcing editorial judgment to the larger collective of Web authors (or, as Benkler puts it, "peer producers") . Back in the late 20th century, when every other search engine used some combination of embedded advertising (site owners paid for good placement within searches) and "expert" judgment (search engine staff determined whether a site were worthy of inclusion in the index): The engine treats links from other websites pointing to a given website as votes of confidence. Whenever one person's page links to another page, that person has stated quite explicitly that the linked page is worth a visit. Google's search engine counts these links as votes of confidence in the quality of that page as compared to other pages that fit the basic search algorithm. Pages that themselves are heavily linked-to count as more important votes of confidence, so if a highly linked-to site links to a given page, that vote counts for more than if an obscure site links to it. By doing this, Google harnessed the distributed judgments of many users, with each judgment created as a by-product of making his or her own site useful, to produce a highly valuable relevance and accreditation algorithm. Of course, the principle of "bibliometrics," or determining the value of a work by its echoes in others' citations, is a controversial and troublesome topic within academic culture. Widely used in the sciences for decades, the expansion of bibliometrics to measure the presumed "impact" or "value" of scholarship within the humanities has generated widespread criticism, as much of the best work is published within books rather than a stable set of indexible journals. The inclusion of peer review in the corporate culture of Google need not have come directly from university life. It could have just as easily come from another field that shares a common ancestor with Google: the Free and Open Source software world. Applications that have emerged from widespread, multi-author, collaborative environments have reshaped every element of the information creation and dissemination process. Almost all email systems, most Web servers, and an increasing number of Web browsers and computer operating systems were built without proprietary claims or controls. Free and Open Source software projects and innovators have promoted an ideology of open flows, constant peer review, and general freedom within a commercial structure that allows for remuneration for services rendered rather than computer code delivered. The fact that many of the early innovators of Free and Open Source software emerged from academia as well explains the ideological continuity among academic computer science departments, many profitable software firms, powerful amateur communities that build and maintain the Internet and the World Wide Web, and Google itself. The Googlization of Students Paradoxically, the very reliance on the principles of peer review within Google and reliance on the principles of peer review in the Google PageRank algorithm have undermined an appreciation for distinctions among information sources - at least among university students. According to a summary of two user studies conducted among students in the United Kingdom, commercial Internet search services dominate students' information-seeking strategies. The studies found that 45 percent of students choose Google as their prime search technology. The university library catalogue was the first choice of only 10 percent of students. Students reported that "ease of use" was their chief justification for choosing a Web search engine over more stable and refined search technologies. But they also expressed satisfaction with the results of the searches done with Google and other major search engines. The studies results are not surprising. There is one particular conclusion that should trouble anyone concerned about the influence of Google on the information skills of university students: "Students' use of [search engines] now influences their perception and expectations of other electronic resources." In other words, if higher-quality search resources and collections to not replicate the reductive simplicity and cleanliness of Google's interface, they are unlikely to attract students in the first place and are sure to frustrate those students who do stumble upon them. A relatively early study from 2002 conducted for the Pew Internet and American Life project found that "Nearly three-quarters (73%) of college students said they use the Internet more than the library, while only 9% said they use the library more than the Internet for information searching." This is a confusing way to phrase and frame the question, however, because even at the turn of the century most academic libraries offered online access to library resources (especially journals) via "the Internet." So it sets up a false distinction. Since 2004, in fact, many libraries have offered direct links from Google Scholar to their library collections to facilitate access when connected to a university network. So the notions of "library" and "Internet" have merged significantly for university students in the United States. The shift toward Google as a first and last stop in research may not be as universal as we assume. A contrasting set of results came from a study of student research behavior at St. Mary's College in California. This study, published in 2007, showed that "A majority of students began their research by consulting course readings or the library's Web site for online access to scholarly journals. To a lesser extent, students used Yahoo!, Google, and Wikipedia as first steps." In addition, the study found that students found bibliographies and other aggregated or subject-based research resources the most fruitful places to start. Overall, students at St. Mary's were significantly challenged by research assignments, and considered themselves frustrated by unclear expectations and an inability to discriminate among sources for quality and relevance. "A majority of students were not as reliant on search engines, as prior research studies have suggested," wrote the study's author, Alison Head. "Only about one in 10 students in our survey reported using to Yahoo! or Google first when conducting research. Only two in 10 students in our survey used search engines as a second step." What's clear from all of these studies is that students need a tremendous amount of guidance through the information ecosystem and universities are not yet providing them the tools. Whether students start from course materials, Wikipedia, or Google, they need to know where to go next and why. In her substantial argument for better information literacy, The University of Google: Education in the Post-Information Age, Tara Brabazon of the University of Brighton (UK) offers some stories of her students' research habits. "Google, and its naturalized mode of searching, encourages bad behavior," she writes. Brabazon explains that the seductive power of Google - its perceived comprehensiveness and authoritativeness - fools students into thinking that a clumsily crafted text search that yields a healthy number of results qualifies as sufficient research. Even if Google links students to millions of documents heretofore inaccessible, it does nothing to teach them how to use the information they discover or even distinguish between the true or false, dependable or sketchy, and polemical or analytical. Because simple Web searches favor simple (and well-established) Web sites, students are unlikely to discover peer-reviewed scholarship unless they actively click over to the obscure Google Scholar service. And even then, they must hope that they have the institutional affiliation to acquire the articles they find. Brabazon criticizes these practices as an expression of a particular form of literacy - "operational literacy," which encourages students to be "code breakers" of complex, multimedia works -- yet fails to consider other important modes of literacy such as "critical literacy," or the ability to judge and distinguish among pieces of information and assemble them as new coherent works. Brabazon concludes that universities should not embrace the ideology of "access" and "findability" so uncritically, but should supplement the ubiquitous power of Google with curricular changes that emphasize the skills of critical literacy. "Critical literacy remains an intervention, signaling more than a decoding of text or a compliant reading of an ideologues rantings," Brabazon writes. "The aim is to create cycles of reflection." The production of sound arguments, interpretations, and analyses has become more of a challenge in the age or constant connectivity and information torrents. There is no reason to believe that Google will recede in importance in students' lives. Nor is there any reason to celebrate Google's pervasive influence as an unadulterated boon to the process of learning. There is much work to be done to both understand what this new information menu offers students (and the rest of us). Therefore, we must generate more effective strategies to live better in the new environment. The Googlization of Scholarship Google Scholar is an interesting side project for the company. Released in 2004, it serves as a broad but shallow access point to a range of academic work. Google convinced hundreds of suppliers of electronic scholarly resources to open their indexes up to Google's "spiders," so the articles could be scanned, copied, and included in Google's index. The publishers benefit from enhanced exposure to their articles to reading communities beyond academia (and, within academia if some institutions lack contracted access to the home-grown search engines). It does something that no other search engine of academic resources does: It offers links to works in areas as diverse as materials science, biophysics, computer science, law, literature, and library science as results of the same keyword search (for instance, "Vaidhyanathan," as there are Vaidhyanathans publishing in all of these areas). However, it has been constructed with Google's usual high level of opacity and without serious consideration of the needs and opinions of academic librarians. The major criticisms that echo from the library community include the lack of transparency about how the engine ranks and sorts works, the fact that collections are uneven and results undependable, and that the search interface lacks the granular detail that librarians and scholars often demand to find the precise article they need. As with most of Google's services, the greatest and most interesting strengths of the service - its breadth of coverage and ease of use - generate its greatest flaws - lack of depth and precision. So the service is clearly a boon to students and lay researchers but of limited utility to scholars. One study of Google Scholar's collection and service discovered that the service was almost a full year behind indexing works published in the leading PubMed collection and concluded that "no serious researcher interested in current medical information or practice excellence should rely on Google Scholar for up-to-date information." Because of North American publishers have been most aggressive at including their works within Google Scholar (or, perhaps, because Google has been most aggressive attracting North American publishers), many works in languages beyond English fail to show up on the first few pages of Google Scholar searches. German literature and social science work, for instance, suffers greatly if one uses Google Scholar as the chief research tool. As more journals move online, research and citation behavior changes as well. A study published in Science in 2008 demonstrated that as more journals came online between 1998 and 2005, scientific literature as a whole cited fewer and newer sources. In other words, forcing scientists to peruse bound volumes of old journals encouraged serendipity and a deeper acknowledgement of long-term debates within fields. Thus researchers are more likely to echo prevailing consensus and narrow the imagination on which research relies. Google's enhancement of this phenomenon only serves to intensify the problem. The mystery of why one particular paper should appear above another paper in Google Scholar searches does not help. Google's "about Google Scholar" site explains that "Google Scholar aims to sort articles the way researchers do, weighing the full text of each article, the author, the publication in which the article appears, and how often the piece has been cited in other scholarly literature. The most relevant results will always appear on the first page." This fails to explain much. The principle at work certainly biases science and technology works above those in the social sciences and humanities, as the lattice of article citations makes up a more solid structure within the sciences than it does the humanities (where much of the most influential work appears in books). Secondly, citation counts do not indicate absolute value, even in the sciences. A high number of citations might indicate that an article stands as prevailing wisdom or consensus within a field, and thus serve as foundational. Or, just as likely, a high citation could might indicate that an article is suspect and open to question. These are not equal values. Ranking such articles as if their citations are the result of the same intellectual process is troublesome. In addition, because Google Scholar operates by the use of full-text indexing and searching, results are likely to come from divergent collections and field. A search for "human genome project" yields a large number of meta-scholarly articles: works that describe or analyze the human genome project from a variety of perspectives. They are all from major figures in the field, such as James Watson and Frances Collins. But the first page of results does not yield articles of actual science done using the human genome database. For that, one must search a specific term or gene. A search for "whale oil" could yield results from agriculture journals, ecology journals, or an article about Herman Melville's Moby Dick. While studies comparing Google Scholar to other commercially available search indexes for scholarly material consistently demonstrate the inadequacies of Google Scholar, it's clear that Google is not going anywhere but front-and-center among both faculty and students. This makes information assessment skills more important than ever. As Google Scholar ranks serve as proxies for citation analysis to assess impact of scholars on their fields, Google might have a direct affect on the future employment of tenure-track researchers. Google Scholar therefore makes the role of librarian central to and more visible within every part of the academic mission. Paradoxically, the more we use Google Scholar, the more we need librarians to help us stumble through the fog of data and scholarship that it offers. The Googlization of Book Learning Google Scholar is a clever experiment and a value-added feature that has helped democratize specialized information for a broader readership. But Google Book Search is a monster of a project that has radically altered the roles and scopes of both publishing and librarianship. Since 2004, Google has been scanning in millions of volumes of books from academic libraries around the world. To do this, Google chose to make copies of copyright-protected books without the permission of copyright holders - a potentially massive number of cases of willful infringement. In late 2008 Google reached settlements in lawsuits brought by the American Publishers' Association and the Authors' Guild. The terms of that settlement not only absolved Google of the potential liability for infringement; it gave the company a virtual monopoly on the electronic distribution of many millions of out-of-print yet in-copyright books from the 20th century. The most important fallout of the Google Book Search settlement is that it leaves Google as the only viable player left in the book-scanning game. Since the 1980s academic libraries have been participating in ad-hoc efforts to scan, preserve, and open up their collections of books to a wider readership. Lately, Microsoft and Yahoo had been helping a not-for-profit venture, the Open Content Alliance, scan books from a small number of academic libraries (although Microsoft withdrew support in 2008). Once Google came into the race in 2004 with its financial commitment exceeded only by its ambition, it has been hard, if not impossible, to argue for a diverse array of participants. After the settlement, in which Google effectively set the price for royalty distribution to copyright holders for books downloaded from the system, Google stands alone. The specific effects on universities are twofold: First, there is now no legal risk in permitting Google to scan in-copyright books in their collections; second, because Google has pledged to place designated "Google Book Search" terminals in public and university libraries across the United States, many libraries that never had the funds or space to build large collections of works can now enjoy access in electronic form. But the secondary effects to these changes could be significant as well. Many libraries could choose to remove books from their collections if they consider the electronic access via Google to be sufficient. Of greater concern is the fact that every library in the United States will soon have an electronic book vending machine, run by and for Google, operating in the midst of an otherwise non-commercial space. Every library will soon be a bookstore. The steady commercialization of academia is not a new story. But it remains a troubling one. The invitation of Google into the republican space of the library directly challenges the core purpose of a library: to act as an "information commons" for the community in which it operates. The Googlization of Research Google's major advantage over almost every other information firm in the world is their massive server space and computing power at the company's disposal. The scale of Google's infrastructure is a company secret. But it's no secret that its willingness to give each GMail user two gigabytes of server space to store email archives is some indication that Google's server farms are formidably and likely of historic proportions. Google's remote storage space is large enough and its computing power fast enough to host and contribute to some massive research projects done in conjunction with academics. In October 2007 Google joined with IBM to establish a server farm devoted to research projects that demand both huge data sets and fast processors - expensive ventures for universities themselves. The University of Washington signed up to have the first computer science department to use the Google-IBM resources. Washington was soon joined by Carnegie Mellon University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Maryland. Researchers at Washington are using servers equipped with suites of open-source software to run complex analyses of Web-posting spam and geographical tagging. In March 2008, the National Science Foundation agreed to vet research proposals for projects that would employ the Google-IBM service. The benefits to researchers and their universities are clear: no single university can afford the servers and processors it would take to do this sort of scientific analysis. By computing in "the cloud," a set of distant servers accessible through inexpensive personal computers connected through Internet-like networks, researchers from around the globe can collaborate and coordinate their efforts. More big science can be done faster and cheaper if Google, IBM, and universities can combine their brain and computing power. The benefits to Google and IBM are clear as well: many of the computational problems academic researchers hope to solve happen to be the ones that these two companies would like to solve. This project gives them easy access to the body of knowledge researchers generate while using these systems. In keeping with Google's traditions and values, nothing about this project seems to indicate that Google claims exclusive rights to work done with its help. However, university officials who negotiate contracts with Google often must sign non-disclosure agreements to ensure that Google's competitors do not have too clear a picture what the company is doing with its academic partnerships. Computing in "the cloud" is both radically empowering and quite concerning. One downside the tangle of rights claims that a widespread collaboration among individual researchers, university technology-transfer offices, and two or more major computer companies can generate. Such a confusing, complicated set of claims not only risks years of litigation among the parties, it could attract significant anti-trust scrutiny as well. Cloud computing and massive, distributed computation has already been declared the next great intellectual revolution by the magazine that generates such hyperbole with impressive regularity. Wired magazine 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-revision almost obsolete. Anderson wrote: Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now 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. The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to -- well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies. 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. Needless to say, Anderson's techno-fundamentalist hyperbole belies a vested interest he has 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 dominates the magazine. Anderson claims that "correlation is enough." In other words, the entire process of generating scientific (or, for that matter, socially scientific) theories and modestly limiting claims to correlation sans causation is obsolete and quaint because, Anderson argues, given enough data and enough computing power, you can draw strong enough correlations to confidently claim you have discovered knowledge. The risk here is more than one of intellectual hubris. The academy does not have a dearth of that. Given the passions and 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, plodding 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? So far, Google has been calling the shots. Every few months, it seems, the company approaches universities with a new initiative that promises stunning returns for the academic equivalent of "no money down." Since 2006 Google has been competing with Microsoft and Yahoo to take over university email services, thus locking in students as lifetime email users and allowing the company to mine the content of emails for clues about consumer preferences and techniques for targeting advertisements. The potential of relieving universities of the cost of running email servers and limiting the storage space of their users to a few megabytes is almost too attractive to pass up. But 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 Rex. Since its birth Google, overflowing with pride, has been seducing its alma mater - the American Academy. If Google is the lens through which we see the world, we all might be cursed to wander the Earth, blinded by ambition. Battelle, John. The Search : How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. New York: Portfolio, 2005. Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks : How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven [Conn.]: Yale University Press, 2006. Brabazon, Tara. The University of Google : Education in the (Post) Information Age. Aldershot, Hampshire, England ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. Bracha, Oren. "Standing Copyright Law on Its Head? The Googlization of Everything and the Many Faces of Property." Texas Law Review 85 (2007). Stross, Randall E. Planet Google : One Company's Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know. 1st Free Press hbk. ed. New York: Free Press, 2008. Weber, Steve. The Success of Open Source. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Can A New Search Engine Outdo Google? : NPR Science Friday

2009-05-15T20:21:43Z

Can A New Search Engine Outdo Google? Talk of the Nation, May 15, 2009 · Is there anything Google can't do? The creators of Wolfram Alpha think so. The new search engine is slated for release this month. Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, explains how Wolfram Alpha works. Click here to listen

New Text: Thoughts on the nature of the user/Google transaction

2009-05-13T20:16:57Z

Could I get a little feedback on this? Thanks. Siva ================================== The nature of the transaction is simple: I give Google access to my electronic trail. Google gives me dozens of powerful services. No cash changes hands. I am generally pleased. And I have little room to complain if Google services are less-than-perfect. But in the never-ending quest to improve the "user experience," Google uses the data it collects from me and everyone else who shares my location and interests to fine-tune the results of my searches. That's great for me when I am shopping. But, as we will see later, it's troublesome when I want to learn about the world. Google needs to keep me just happy enough that I don't stray to competing services. Basically, we are like cattle to Google. Ranchers care about the health and welfare of their cattle. But ranchers need not provide a perfect or lovely setting for cattle. Eventually cattle are sold down the line. I don't want to overstate this point, however. It's not our bodies or souls that get sold down the line. It's the record of our choices, expressions, concerns, and desires. This record is a valuable collection of data. Yet it's only valuable in the aggregate. No one much cares about the details of my searches per se. But as part of an elaborate flow of data that allows powerful computers to profile me via patterns of associations and likenesses to others who share my concerns and interests, I am one small element in a large collection of valuable content producers. The next step of the transaction is how Google makes its money. It harvests our profiles to target advertisements keyed to the words we search. Precision is the goal here. Google wants advertisers to trust that the people who see their paid placements are likely to be the people who desire their products or services. They have no interest in broadcasting. That's a waste of money. The more Google knows about us, the more effective its advertising services can be. Understanding the nature of this transaction is the first step to understanding the Googlization of us. But how much does Google know about us? How much does it keep and how much does it discard? How long does it keep that information? And why? Google's "privacy policy" is not much help in this regard. In fact, it's pretty much the antithesis of a "privacy policy." It's a "lack-of-privacy policy." For instance, the policy outlines what it will collect from users -- a reasonable yet significant amount: IP numbers (numbers assigned to a computer when it logs into an Internet service provider that indicate the provider and the user's general location), search queries (the record of everything we care about, wonder about, or fantasize about), and information about Web browsers and preference settings (fairly trivial but necessary to make Google work well). And Google promises not to distribute this data with two major exceptions: "We provide such information to our subsidiaries, affiliated companies or other trusted businesses or persons for the purpose of processing personal information on our behalf," and "We have a good faith belief that access, use, preservation or disclosure of such information is reasonably necessary to (a) satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request, (b) enforce applicable Terms of Service, including investigation of potential violations thereof, (c) detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues, or (d) protect against imminent harm to the rights, property or safety of Google, its users or the public as required or permitted by law." It's important to remember that Google's privacy policy is a pledge from the company to us. It is binding in so far as if the company violated its policy, a user could sue Google in the United States for deceptive trade practices. However, Google can and does change its policy often, without warning. So today's policy - for all its strengths and weaknesses - might not be the policy tomorrow or next year. You might have engaged with Google and donated your data trail to it with an understanding of the transaction as expressed in an early version of the policy only to discover that Google changed the policy while you were not looking. The policy does pledge that "We will not reduce your rights under this Privacy Policy without your explicit consent, and we expect most such changes will be minor." But that is cold comfort, as the policy itself gives Google substantial power over the data. If you read the privacy policy carefully, it's clear that the policy retains for Google substantial autonomy to make decisions about our data without regard for our interests. Google will not share information with companies outside the company without user consent. But the provision declaring that Google will share information with law enforcement or governmental agencies as it sees fit is much more troubling. If another company acquires Google, the policy states, the company will inform users of the transfer of the data. But there is no promise that users will have a chance to purge their data from Google's system in time to avoid a less scrupulous company's acquisition. Once more we are reminded that while Google's commitments to fairness and transparency are sincere and important, they are only as good as the current form and condition of the company. If Google's revenues slip or its board of directors changes significantly, all the trust we place in the company today might be for naught. To complicate matters more, each Google service has its own "privacy policy" page. The index page for these policies contains a series of videos that outline the terms of data collection and retention. One of the videos echoes the statement that Google only retains personally identifiable information for 18 months after acquiring it. After 18 months, information such as the IP number is "anonymized" so that it's difficult to trace a search query to a particular user. However, that pledge is not made in the policy itself. Although Google's public pronouncements about privacy and its general privacy statement fail to explain this point, Google actually has two classes of users. So it has two distinct levels of data accumulation and processing. The larger, general Google user population simply uses the classic blank page with the search box in the center. Such general users leave limited data trails for Google to read and build services around. The second class might be called the group of "power users." These folks sign in to Google services such as GMail, Blogger, or iGoogle. Google has much richer and more detailed dossiers on these users. Google rightly claims that it serves these "power users" better than it serves the general users. Registered users get more subtle, personalized search results and a host of valuable services in exchange for extremely valuable data and content. Google does empower users to control the information flow, but not subtly or granularly. Google's settings page offers a series of "on-off switches" that can prevent Google from placing "cookies" in a browser or from retaining a list of Web sites a user has visited information. For power users, Google lets them delete specific items from the list of Web site visits. The problem is, of course, that the default settings for all Google interfaces grant Google maximum access to information. One must already be concerned about the amount and nature of Google's data collection to even seek out the page that offers all these choices. Google has come under significant scrutiny for its data-retention policies in the United States and in Europe. In the United States, privacy regulations are fairly weak. But in Europe, Google has faced a much stiffer set of regulations. Understandably, Google officials have practiced their responses to questions about data retention and privacy. For instance, Google vice-president Marissa Mayer explained to U.S. television host Charlie Rose in early 2009, "In all cases it's a trade off, right, where you will give up some of your privacy in order to gain some functionality," Mayer said. "And so we really need to make those trade-offs really clear to people, what information are we using and what's the benefit to them, and then ultimately leave it to user choice." Defaults and the Nature of Freedom Mayer, who is very disciplined in her answers to questions about privacy, always answers privacy challenges with statements very close to this. But Mayer, and thus Google in general, both misunderstands privacy and does not acknowledge the power of defaults. In their 2007 book, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, economist Richard Thaler and law professor Cass Sunstein describe a concept they call "choice architecture." Plainly put, the structure and order of the choices offered to us can have profound influence over the choices we make. So, for instance, the particular order of foods available in a school cafeteria can influence children to eat better. The positions restrooms and break rooms can have an effect on the creativity and communality of office staff. And, in the most well known example of how "defaults" can influence what is otherwise a "free" choice, studies have demonstrated that when employer-based retirement plans in the United States required employees to "opt in" to them, more than 40 percent either failed to enroll or contributed too little to get matching contributions from their employers. Yet when the default was set to automatically enroll employees, and they were given the option of cancelling the contributions, enrollment reached 98 percent within six months. The default setting of automatic enrollment, Thaler and Sunstein explain, helped employees overcome the "inertia" caused by business, distraction, and forgetfulness. That simple choice architecture could have such an important effect on so many human behaviors without overt coercion or even elaborate incentives convinced Thaler and Sunstein that such an approach - they call it "libertarian paternalism" - can accomplish many important public policy goals without significant cost to either the state or private firms. If a system is designed one way, people will tend to make one choice more than another, despite the fact that they have the freedom to make either choice. "There is no such thing as a 'neutral' design," Thaler and Sunstein write. So what does Google do with "nudges?" It's clear that Google understands the power of defaults. It's in the company's interest to set all user defaults to vacuum the most usable data in the most contexts. By default, Google places a cookie in your Web browser to help the service remember who you are and what you have searched. By default, Google tracks your searches and clicks. By default, Google retains that data for a limited period of time and uses it to target advertisements and refine search results. Google gives us the power to switch off all these features. It even provides videos explaining how to do this. When Mayer and others at Google speak about the practices and policies of private data collection and processing (otherwise known as "privacy" policy), they never discuss the power of defaults. They only emphasize the pure freedom and power that users have over their data. Celebrating freedom and user autonomy is one of the great tricks of commercial practice in the global information economy. We are trained to believe that having more choices - empty though they may be - is the very essence of human freedom. But meaningful freedom implies real control over the terms of one's life. Merely setting up a menu with switches does not serve the interests of any but the most adept, engaged, and educated. In an ecological sense, setting the defaults to maximize the benefits for the firm and hiding the switches beneath a series of pages is irresponsible. But we should not expect any firm to behave differently. If we wish to have a different set of defaults in complex economies such as the Web, we are going to have to rely on consortia of firms reacting to pressure from consumer groups or ask the state to regulate such defaults. Google officials also don't clarify the fact that completely opting out of the Google data collection practices significantly degrades the service Google will provide. Google officials make it clear that grabbing and using personal data improves the services. But they are intentionally vague about what that means to users. For those few Google users who click through the three pages it takes to get to adjust their options, it's not hard to figure out the cost of opting out. Playing around with such options can give you a pretty clear idea of the nature of the transaction between Google and its users. But for the vast majority of users who never ask questions about the fate of their data, the nature of the transaction remains a mystery. ...

Life at the Googleplex

2009-05-13T19:47:20Z

Eric Schmidt on the Universalism of the Internet

2009-05-13T19:44:40Z

Schmidt on Universalism: "The most common question I get about Google is 'how is it different everywhere else?' and I am sorry to tell you that it's not. People still care about Britney Spears in these other countries. It's really very disturbing. "The key insight about my service at Google is that people are the same everywhere." Schmidt on Free Labor: "People have a lot of free time. You might as well give them some task like translating your Web site."