Google is taking over the world.
Do you need directions to your cousin’s birthday party? Google Maps can show you.
Do you need to know who won the World Series in 1972? Google can tell you (the Oakland Athletics won, by the way).
Do you need to find a cartoon picture of a monkey eating a banana? You guessed it. Google Images has it.
And now, in an age where Web sites, like Facebook, reign, set the template and the tone of social networking, Google – albeit under our noses – has taken a swing at that, too.
You may not have noticed it, but with Google’s relatively new iGoogle feature, you can set up a homepage in which all of your favorite news sites and RSS feeds are consolidated into one area. You can check your e-mail, add a picture, a short profile and you can chat with other iGoogle users in real time. There also are status updates. These features ring heavily of social networking, and it’s no doubt on purpose.
And so here we sit, at the very beginning of a technological revolution that 30 years from now will likely be unrecognizable to us. We are only witnessing the very tip of an iceberg that proves to show humanity the vital significance and implications of an interconnected world. We now live in a world where Google is a noun and a verb, and concepts like social networking and instantaneous access to information threaten to completely reinvent the way in which people think, communicate and share information.
As Google spreads further into our consciousness like slowly expanding ooze, infiltrating the way we inquire about information and now each other, something eerie is happening.
Does the future involve a world in which everybody sees everybody else and conversations and human interaction are mediated by a Google logo and the lights of a computer monitor? Only time will tell.
But I think it’s important to take a look at what Google is doing by introducing social networking features. They are infiltrating popular culture in a subtle way, slowly becoming so ubiquitous that they are engrained in the very fabric of American culture.
My iGoogle has RSS feeds from Wired, Digg, NPR and the Weather Channel (I’m a nerd, I know). It’s convenient, and fun, but it leaves me wondering about the implications.
How interconnected are we? What does the culture surrounding Google, Facebook, Twitter and MySpace say about our generation?
Is the future a gloomy reality in which every piece of information about us is visible and up for criticism by all, or a dawn of an new era in which access to information and communication reach monumental heights, where instant access to figures, news and people become a state of normalcy?
Not even Google can answer that yet.
-Tyler Branson is an English senior.
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LauraGibbs 3 years ago
The iGoogle service is not especially new; it's been around since 2005, which is a LONG time in the world of the web.
I also have to question why people seem to find there something "inhuman" about communicating in this way, reading written words on a computer screen. English majors spend most of their college careers studying words in written form... so how is reading words on a printed page so different from reading words on a computer screen? Why are the lights of a computer monitor any more ominous than the crackle of paper as you turn the pages of a printed book?
As the saying goes, "Technology is anything invented after you were born." We take writing and books for granted, because we've always had them; they don't seem eerie at all. The Internet is new, it is different - but why does that make it eerie?
To see someone just as anxious about writing as people are nowadays about the Internet, we'd have to go back to Plato's Socrates, who railed against written communication as being inhuman, because, as he saw it, written discourse was unable to answer questions put to it, only repeating the same thing over and over and over again in an inhuman monotony.
True enough... but the irony is that we know about this because today we can read Plato's ancient words in written form! And, as someone who studies ancient Greek, I sure wish we had Plato's podcasts as well, so that we could hear how he pronounced the words! :-)
JJanowiak 3 years ago
This is a very interesting column, but I disagree with you on a few points:
1) While Google does basically have monopoly power on a few aspects of information access like digitized books, they're only one of many corporations that organize information efficiently, so if you fear that Google is going to be the sole mediator of information in the future, it's going to be because it's a better product than its competitors (not something Google can really help).
2) Just because the SNS features of iGoogle exist doesn't mean that people will use them. The subset of people already using iGoogle is small anyway - you're only the second person I've ever heard talk about it and the time I've seen it the page was as cluttered and disorganized as a Myspace. Google has introduced ideas before that have failed to catch on, and while iGoogle's usage can only go up, its SNS capabilities and potential user base are far inferior to the best dedicated SNS sites that currently exist.
3) The root question you seem to be asking is, "what are the consequences of greater and more efficient access to information?" But the concepts that form that question have more to do with the consequences of having greater information period. The amount of knowledge available to us is only going to increase over time with a corresponding increase in the base of knowledge that we consider necessary to function in our society. If we have to ask our friends every time we want to know who won the World Series, we may experience the nice of effects of interpersonal communication, but we aren't going to accrue knowledge efficiently or accurately. I don't think you disagree with this assessment, but you are definitely right to point out that the fuzzy, difficult-to-define nature of the pleasure we as humans get from sharing information personally has a value that is difficult to quantify and is lost on many of the people that advocate for more efficient access (and expectation of access) to knowledge.
JJanowiak 3 years ago
This manifests itself in strange ways sometimes. When I want to know the weather, I usually check the computer rather than going outside, looking at the sky, and feeling how warm and humid it is; that must be something bizarre to people who aren't as dependent on the internet to organize knowledge. But, and this is something all college students must experience, there is the extraordinarily common occurrence when a question pops into our head and we leap to check the internet for an answer rather than ask someone precisely because we crave that efficiency. The impatience of getting an answer to a question is something that we have been trained to do because of the way we are spoiled by easy access to information.
As you say, this has the net effect of making us smarter, more alienated people, and it is something that we have to constantly be on guard for. But this is the march of history, you know? We simply NEED to know more things to be good citizens and members of society, and the impersonal-yet-hyperefficient access to knowledge that we have is essentially the bedrock of achieving that goal. No amount of hand-wringing can change that fact, but the bargain that we're all apparently willing to make to be more intelligent doesn't have to be Faustian. We just need to constantly be aware of the way that information access shapes us as social beings, which is why columns and discussions like this are so important.