Dissertation Topic · Friday November 17, 2006
ATTENTION:
Here is my tentative dissertation topic. If anybody has any good suggestions on theorists/theories that I can employ in this investigation, please leave a comment or drop me a line! I’m sort of blanking right now. To the izzo. Otherwise, feeling pretty good about this new direction, for now.
“The Gospel According to Google: Information as Commodity in Google’s Technological Utopia”
Google’s mission statement is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Google also makes hundreds of millions of dollars by attaching advertisements to the world’s information.
Unlike traditional media companies such as Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. and Time Warner, Google doesn’t create original content for public consumption and entertainment. Rather, Google uses its massive investments in research, human capital, and server and network infrastructure to build frameworks by which information can be created, ordered, stored, and found. For instance, Google News links to hundreds of news sources around the globe. Google Scholar searches through myriad journals and research communities to find academic papers, articles, and abstracts. Blogger.com (owned by Google) hosts over a million individual and group blogs. YouTube (a recent Google acquisition) serves over 100 million video clips a day to web users. And these services represent just the tip of Google’s information iceberg.
While Google’s own corporate guidelines and philosophies espouse such lofty principles as “Don’t be evil” and “Democracy on the web works”, and there’s little reason to believe that they have an evil hidden agenda, their overt mission presents a profoundly problematic narrative in itself. The “organising of the world’s information” and subsequent commodification of this information offers a rich case study into the ways in which discourses of power and control may be manifested in this relatively new medium which prides itself on openness, democracy, decentralisation, and freedom of access.
Although Google and many web pundits may interpret it differently, Google’s mission statement can be read as libertarian capitalism wrapped up in the comforting promise of a “democratic commons of information”, accessible to all regardless of language, border, gender, age, race, or class. This is similar to the technologically utopian language of other popular web proponents such as Wired Magazine and BoingBoing.net.
In my dissertation, I would like to inquire into the subtle shades of power and symbolic violence that may occur as a result of the commodification of information by Google. What kinds of information might get excluded from Google’s “world of information” and why? Do Google’s AdSense and AdWord programs, which insert subtle text ads into web pages and Gmail accounts according to the content of the page, represent a form of market-based surveillance—and is it still surveillance even if human eyes never read the email? What are the positive ways in which Google is contributing to a diverse and open discourse in the online public sphere?
Any other interesting questions I can ask here?
A Foulcauldian approach can also be employed, in examining the possibilities for a “panoptic gaze of surveillance” by a company who controls much of the world’s information—or perhaps by somebody who illegimately gains access to that information.
In relation to the Panoptic Gaze: Google as the mind of God. “What would a perfect search engine look like? we asked [Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google]. “It would be the mind of God. Larry [Page] says it would know exactly what you want and give you back exactly what you need.””
source
Theories:
Habermas – public sphere
Bourdieu – symbolic violence
McLuhan – global village as neo conservative concept? Havers.
Heidegger – Question Concerning Technology, Standing Reserve
For some reason, I’m blanking on other theorists in relation to this topic. Especially female theorists! I would like to have a gender balance here.
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Philip Ashlock writes:
To throw a few more concepts in the mix, check out The Google AI Starts Work on Its Ears and here’s a brief paper I recently wrote for a film theory class which concludes by connecting Google to the Alpha 60 in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville . It’s also helpful to remember that Google’s business model is one which brings them revenue as they give people more opportunities to generate and/or organize content.
posted Nov 17, 02:58 PM ~ #
alex writes:
Thank you for the feedback, Philip. Unfortunately, you are not allowed to look at ideas in a positive light in media and cultural studies. Everything is co-opted by the capitalist/dominant system. There is no escape!
posted Nov 17, 03:03 PM ~ #
jane writes:
I actually understand most of this, amazing! Google as the mind of God, it figures out what you want and gives you what you need…...
God in a box!
Looking forward to future developments…..
posted Nov 17, 04:59 PM ~ #
wesley writes:
I think you hinted at this, but I am curious as to whether any info-gathering/disseminating entity such as Google can ever maintain a neutral bias (Ok, if it’s neutral, there is no bias) in the way it delivers the info, or the weight it gives to the display of certain streams of information.
For example, the editors (are there human editors, or are there thousands of algorithms deciding this?) of Google have to make subjective judgements about the stories which deserve to be headlined in Google News?
There could be a massive (as in the amount of info that Google spews out) but nearly imperceptible tilt in it’s presentation – either left or right – and we would never know it; and maybe even the Editors would not even be aware of it’s existence, simply because we as humans cannot prevent ourselves from handling and processing information in subjective ways, however subtle and subconcious those ways might be. And maybe the neutral presentation of news of something that does not exist in nature anyway. . .
If this is true, then Google has the power, intended or not, to make subtle but seismic shifts in public opinion.
Does this make any sense at all?
posted Nov 17, 06:49 PM ~ #
wesley writes:
Oops! I meant to say towards the end, “And maybe the neutral presentation of news IS something that does not exist in nature anyway . . .”
posted Nov 17, 06:54 PM ~ #
geneviève writes:
There was a short article about Google in a recent Adbusters where they did this experience of searching certain things on google.com, then searching the same things on google.cn (google in China) and a lot fewer things come up, especially for things like “Tibet” and “Tiananmen Square”. In other words, yes, google organizes the world’s information, but they also are willing to limit your access to it on demand.
posted Nov 17, 09:29 PM ~ #
alex writes:
i don’t know if “neutrality” truly exists in any discipline/profession. bias-free journalism is a myth, because there’s always going to be some sort of “enframing” in a story, even in the subtleties of photo captioning, story layout, language used, etc. a news journalist, while performing as a professional under the guise of “objectivity”, is going to have to describe the news event. in the process of encoding that description, the journalist enscribes only one viewpoint of that event. and then the reader brings their own subjectivity to the story at the point of decoding! so yeah, neutral presentation doesn’t really exist.
i suppose in some scientific fields where there is supposed to be a purely logical, rational approach to a situation, that might be the closest one gets to a bias-free objectivity. for instance, if you are building a rocket to go into outer space, you are going to try and get as close to a pure mathematical logic as possible because otherwise it might not fly or people will lose their lives.
still, bias exists in the sciences, as each scientist/engineer brings their own history/personality into their projects.
or, for instance, a web developer building a web app might try to use the most perfect and efficient code that they can in building the program, but there’s still a certain “way of doing it”, and it’s open to critique by others. one person’s perfect code is another’s cruft fest.
posted Nov 20, 07:46 AM ~ #