I love the blogging-of-book format of The Googlization of Everything, and I appreciate Siva Vaidhyanathan’s perspective on the increasing omnipresence of Google. I’m pretty sure you can’t be everywhere at once (monopoly!) and not be evil. One of the concerns I have about the pervasive use of Google is that we, as a society, will not value resources that can’t be googled. Says Lyotard,
“We can predict that anything in the constituted body of knowledge that is not translatable in this way will be abandoned and that the direction of new research will be dictated by the possibility of its eventual results being translatable into computer language.” – from the Postmodern Condition
On the one hand, with the burgeoning volumes of information available, some sort of whittling down is necessary. On the other hand, this digitized version of the world becomes the only cultural framework the “world” will know. This digital colonization of the mind will be the ultimate cultural monopoly.
Siva Vaidhyanathan said
Nicely put!
Siva