“We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us,” Winston Churchill observed about the symbiotic relationship between our architecture and ourselves. The same may be said for how we interact with our technologies.

Take a look at texting. The numbers seem to grow all the time but as of the Kaiser Foundation Study published in January 2010, young people were sending on average 3000 texts per month and were spending four times the amount of time texting than they were actually talking on their phones. And texting has created has influenced communications in several ways:

First of all, because people text on their cellphones, most must use a virtual keyboard on a touchscreen (Blackberry owners get to use the tiny physical keys, which is slightly more user friendly, I suppose.). In either case, the keys are much smaller than the average computer keyboard’s keys, so it’s easy to make mistakes. Plus, using the virtual keyboard also creates another level of awkwardness because you have to shift to a second (and on some cellphones a third) view to access all the characters on the QWERTY keyboard. In addition texting has the “short message service” limitation of 160 characters.

Then there’s the speed at which the communication is sent. Texts are delivered pretty much instantaneously. This leads people to think that they must respond at roughly the same speed. Delaying a response seems for many to imply that you’re ignoring the person contacted you.

The combination of a virtual awkward keyboard, the limited length, and the pressure to rapidly respond engenders the kind of shorthand of contracted words (Xlnt for excellent, rite for write), pictograms (b4 for before, @om for atom), initializations (N for no, LOL for laughing out loud, CWOT for complete waste of time), and nonstandard acronyms (anfscd for and now for something completely different, btdt for been there, done that, hhoj for ha, ha, only joking. Notice how the shorthand becomes more and more cryptic and we haven’t even talked about the emoticons—those variations on the ubiquitous smiley face using strings of punctuation

I know I’m old—way over thirty—but texting seems to me like the new pig Latin—another code designed to communicate secretly and to exclude others. In the case of pig Latin, the aim was to exclude parents. And for some ages the same may be true to today’s texting. It’s a silent and secret form of communication one can do in one’s lap under the dinner table. So essentially the technology of sending written messages via cell phones creates private languages.

Texting can be a convenient way to quickly notify someone, but the effects, especially for younger people, can be more far-reaching and burdensome and hardly convenient. Sherry Turkle met with one sixteen-year-old named Sanjay during her research for her new book Alone/Together. He expressed anxiety and frustration around texting. He turned off his phone while he spoke with Turkle for an hour. Turkle writes: “At the end of our conversation, he turns his phone back on. He looks at me ruefully, almost embarrassed. He has received over a hundred text messages as were speaking. Some are from his girlfriend, who, he says, “is having a meltdown.” Some are from a group of close friends trying to organize a small concert. He feels a lot of pressure to reply to both situations and begins to pick up his books and laptop so he can find a quiet place to set himself to the task. . . . “I can’t imagine doing this when I get older.” And then, more quietly, “How long do I have to continue doing this?” Sounds more like he’s facing a prison sentence rather than the joy of continuous connection  . . .

In a recent  New York Review of Books (August 18th, 2011), James Gleick discusses how Google dominates us in a review of four new books about Google. The books vary in their approach and general content, as the titles indicate:

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy

I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 by Douglas Edwards

The Googlization of Everything (and Why We Should Worry!) by Siva Vaidhyanathan

Search and Destroy: Why You Can’t Trust Google Inc. by Scott Cleland with Ira Brodsky

Rather than a comprehensive review of the books, Gleick’s essay describes the early history of Google, some of its technological innovations, a few of its scrapes with the law regarding privacy, and just how comprehensive its knowledge of individuals is. Along the way he makes a couple of really interesting points:

Gleick says that no one really understands very well how and how much Google has changed the information economy.  But he observes that the products, the merchandise, of this new economy are not information itself but attention. “These commodities have an inverse relationship. When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.” What Google sells is the attention that we as users willingly give to it.

For businesses, Google provides a way to more effectively target their ads by matching their keywords to users’ search history. The company justifies this to the users by saying that it is helping marketers better understand what a user might be looking for. But in fact it uses advanced artificial intelligence, which in this case is targeted advertising, to entice a huge and enthusiastic advertising base to sign up for its services. And by making the terms based on pay-per-click rather pay for ad placement and by monitoring what users clicked on what ads, they offer the quantitative evaluation of the success of ads that businesses have long sought. As John Wanamaker, an early department store merchant, observed, “ Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” It’s a problem that has plagued businesses for a long time, so Google’s finding an answer constitutes a major breakthrough.

Gleick finds the basis for Google’s domination in Siva Vaidhyananthan’s The Googlization of Everything (and Why We Should Worry).  Basically they both argue that Google “dominates” us because it tracks our searches and the ads we click on. The company claims it uses that information to deliver better search results and ads to individual users based on the interests and biases they exhibit in their searching and advertising interests. But then it also uses that information in the aggregate to help advertisers better target prospective customers and makes a lot of money in the process.

Actually I don’t find that Google dominates its users in this way. It certainly dominates the online advertising business, with 41% of all online revenue flowing into its coffers. And it dominates the search engine business, being by far the most popular search site out there. And it's trying to dominate other online business arenas as well. But it doesn’t really dominate its users. What it actually does is exploit which, which I think may well be worse.