Google

'Das Google Problem: is the invisible mouse benevolent?
Tony Curzon Price 20 - 4 - 2007

The way Google organises knowledge raises fears that in the process understanding will be crushed. Tony Curzon Price identifies a problem and points to a solution.

It has become fashionable to worry about Google's market power and economic clout, as in the Business Week cover story on 9 April 2007: "Is Google Too Powerful?" It elaborates the question thus: "Will the vast commercial landscape of the Net, like so many other tech markets in the past, condense to one dominant force for the foreseeable future? Will we just Google everything?"
But we should be asking the bigger question about Google's and the rest of the algorithmic web: what power does it have over human understanding?
Alain Finkielkraut, the French philosopher, makes the philosopher's case against Google, Wikipedia, the blogsphere, Digg et al in a March 2007 conversation on France Culture. The web is destroying "the work" - the article, the novel, the essay, the film - by bringing us information without any of the carefully crafted context that can transform information into knowledge or even wisdom. A Google search is the result of a populist, market-like algorithm in which the most popular "goods" (items of information) have the highest "price" (rank on the search page). Populist, atomistic, consumerist: as happens to other commodities, the reduction of "works" to "information" eliminates the subtleties that make cultural productions distinctive. As David Levi Strauss has it, web surfing is eliminating the trace, the permanent, and turning culture into mere momentary flow.'

Lees verder: http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article.jsp?id=6&debateId=27&articleId=4546