I have been considering a couple of recent developments, which relate to the Internet and Google. I read a few days ago in the news about Google's plans to publish millions of books online being blocked by the US justice department.......which has provoked me to reflect on the whole 'Google-ism' that is happening in our culture right now!
"Google it" has become a widely used term which demonstrates the powerful position as a knowledge base that the search engine Google has become, in a relatively short space of time. I think it is widely accepted that an underpinning philosophy of our culture is that knowledge has long been considered power. Authoritative discourses exist in our society that have long wielded power – essentially scientific discourses: law, medicine, politics, academia and religion being the main constructed power and knowledge discourses that I can think of.
Is Google’s proposed ownership of knowledge and the written repository of knowledge on the Internet simply a move to make all knowledge accessible, with no economic interest? Or does this proposal suggest a more sinister manipulation of societies access to knowledge?
For me this poses only more questions. It spurs me to consider what the future may look like. I cannot help but think of such dystopian fictions such as Fahrenheit 511 and 1984. Who, and what is Google, the biggest search engine on the planet, and so much more. Google seems to have crept up on us, and then pounced! Google Chrome, Google OS, YouTube ownership, gmail, Google adsense, Google Reader, iGoogle, Google alerts ………and with this latest plan they would control access to millions of published literary works. Google claims “the deal would give readers unprecedented access to books that have been out of print for years.” The US Justice Department has intervened as “in its present form it would give Google sole authority for books whose copyright holder could not be found and provide inadequate protection to foreign rights holders.” So what does this tell us? IS the Justice Department really concerned about copyright, or is there a more covert economic agenda circulating. When corporations like Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo have all objected to this plan….one wonders if this is about the liberty of knowledge or economics of power!
I have long thought that mass media is purely a medium for mass control – the new “opium of the masses”. I eventually refused to have a television in my house in the UK (much to my children’s abhorrence). Yet, I have embraced the Internet for it’s apparent uncensored access to information and knowledge. My concern, as a parent, is that not enough is being done in education to fully equip the young generation with the critical analytical skills to assess the quality and source of information that they access on the Internet. I have had numerous debates with my teenagers challenging the validity of some statement they are repeating from a source on Google. They seemed to have moved a leap from that era where their school teacher suddenly becomes the font of all absolute knowledge, to substituting this with Google.
If Google continue to dominate all aspects of Internet use, where does this leave culture if this mass medium is controlled by one super corporation……and yet again I ask – Who is Google? Their move to acquire YouTube, and therefore the most used and most powerful video database on the Internet concerns me. The ‘moving image’ radically changed culture in the early part of the twentieth century, and I think it is hard not to acknowledge that the visual is to some degree privileged over the textual in today’s culture. Google have apparently made some ‘subtle’ changes to their visual database via Google Video and YouTube. Up until recently you could search for a “most watched’ video, even most watched on a certain date at a certain time. The most watched videos on YouTube WERE Zeitgeist and other ‘politically challenging’ video clips. Interestingly, the options Google now offers us are ‘Videos being watched now’, ‘Featured’ and ‘Popular’…..not surprisingly all these offerings are saturated with banal entertainment to sedate the masses!
So Google will run the largest repository of graphical images on the Internet, and now propose to operate the largest repository of published literary works? Doublethink, Newspeak, Ministry of Truth……..Orwell was so much closer to an accurate depiction of a future society than even he could have ever imagined!
What if I want to access a novel in ten years time, and I do not want to use Google? Will I have other choices that will enable me access?
