http://www.googlizationofeverything.com/2007/09/where_is_this_book_going.php
Siva says:
I am asking four key questions in my examination of Google:
• The phenomenological: How does using Google alter our perceptions of the world? Are its search results accurate and appropriate? How is Google changing its search functions through human intervention? Are Google’s search algorithms inherently conservative, i.e. do they favor the establish and thus limit the dynamism of the Web? How will G affect what we know?
• The cultural and communal: How is Google’s ubiquity affecting the production and dissemination of cultural practice and knowledge? How will G affect what we make?
• The political: how has the corporation altered the rules and practices that govern other companies, institutions, and states? Will advertising ever be the same? Has Google exposed many of the core tenets of advertising to be unfounded? Will Google kill the Superbowl ad? How will G affect the ways that governments and organizations and corporations work?
• The global: how can Google’s technocratic libertarian ideology mesh with the conflicting notions of knowledge and propriety in distant far from Mountainview, California? Will Google’s relationship with the brutal government of the People’s Republic of China be its undoing? Will China change Google more than Google changes China? How will G change the world?
A reply to another comment by someone in the blog:
Steven on September 25, 2007 2:03 PM:
I just wanted to reply to a lot of what Mr. Goldfarb said in his comment.
As a academic library student, I see hundreds of undergraduates and read dozens of scholarly articles about their research habits. More and more their search strategies involve typing a few words in a search box and taking what comes. And, congruently, studies show that they make less of a distinction between Google, the library catalogue, and a journal database search function. That is, all three are taken as equal. They are not equal–and further, they are not even unequal in the same proportions for each discipline.
You may comment that you have a number of years of successful research under your belt, and you are qualified to make the judgement between what is 95% junk and what is 5% gold. Yet, as Google and those companies like it erode the distinction between what is produced by corporations and what is specially selected by experts, including those of us in the library world who have undergraduate, postgraduate and now professional training in their chosen fields, those who come after you will find it much more difficult to be as successful as you have become.
And, perhaps you didn’t get the message, but no medium is without bias or is inherently neutral.
