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September 26, 2007, 06:32 AM ET
A Book on Google Goes Interactive
Google’s famous motto — “Don’t be evil” — has long been cited as a sign that the company isn’t your typical corporate hegemon. But now that its search engine has “utterly infiltrated our culture,” writes Siva Vaidhyanathan, it’s time to start asking questions about Google-as-monolith.
“If Google becomes the dominant way we navigate the Internet, and thus the primary lens through which we experience both the local and the global, then it will have remarkable power to set agendas and alter perceptions,” writes Mr. Vaidhyanathan, an associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia. “Its biases are built into its algorithms. It knows more about us every day. We know almost nothing about it.”
The scholar will take on the search engine in a forthcoming book, The Googlization of Everything: How One Company is Disrupting Culture, Commerce, and Community—and Why We Should Worry. But observers won’t have to wait to read his thoughts on Google. The professor is chronicling his progress on the book on a new blog.
The blog was created by the Institute for the Future of the Book, affiliated with the University of Southern California, which has made Mr. Vaidhyanathan its first fellow. Many of the institute’s projects have attempted to turn book writing into an interactive process, and the new blog will be no exception: Mr. Vaidhyanathan says he will post snippets of text that he has composed, and let readers have at them. “They might never make it into the manuscript,” he writes. “But they will be up here for you to rip up or smooth over.” —Brock Read
Categories: Search-Engines, Research
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