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Building Wonderland Bit by Bit

3/30/2013

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Picture
When something is digitized, whether it is some text, an image, a video, or a series of sounds, it becomes broken up into a language made up of just ones and zeros, the universal language known as the binary code of electronic
communications. Each letter becomes a series of digits. Every image first becomes a series of pixels, each of which is then translated into a series of digits. In the end the whole audio-visual world can be reduced to an infinite series of ones and zeros, and we are swept down a rabbit hole where everything becomes “content,” separated from its forms and often from its context as well. This is the world in which mash-ups are considered high art, and it is also the world in which data, information, and knowledge are jumbled together, morphing into undifferentiated instantiations of the same "content."

Digitalization is the great leveler of meaning and value in our time. It can make entities seem both discrete and connected at the same time. If I search on Google for “paradise,” the first thing that appears will be an advertisement for the Paradise Rock Club on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston (since I live in the environs) followed by bakeries, a small town in Michigan, pictures of tropical islands, and innumerable stores and restaurants that have adopted the popular name. Occasional Wikipedia entries are scattered about alluding to
another world.

It is only in the middle of the fifth page (does anyone ever go that deeply into a search?) that I finally come across what I was really after: information about Dante’s epic poem Paradise. What’s more,  except occasionally for the first entry, all the results appear in the same format accompanied by descriptions of roughly equal length. Rock clubs,  tropical islands, and world-class masterpieces—all appear of equal weight when sorted by search engines such as Google or Bing. (Admittedly Dante’s work appears closer to the top if one searches on “paradiso.” In the world of “Content” (and let’s not forget “Big Data”), life does indeed seem to be getting, as Alice might observe, "curiouser and curiouser,"  by the day. 


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Does Google Really “Dominate Us?

10/3/2011

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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.

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