Siva Vaidhyanathan, professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, spoke about the benefits and dangers of Google on Monday — a topic especially close to home, given that the Internet giant’s founders are Stanford computer science alums.
“My book is about us our willingness, our ease, our enthusiasm for folding Google into our lives,” said Vaidhyanathan, who authored “The Googlization of Everything.”
Many people find it hard to get directions to a restaurant without relying on Google, he said. Indeed, between 60 and 70 percent of the Web searches in the United States go through the company’s search engine and people constantly adopt the software it produces from “Google Labs.”
“How did this happen?” he asked. “Google’s 12 years old now — its voice is just starting to change.”
“What I thought we lacked when I started researching this book was an account of the nature of the transaction,” he said. “What do we give Google? What does Google give us?”
One of Google’s largest public services, he argued, is scanning books in a partnership with the University of Michigan’s library and has since expanded to more than 60 institutions.
“When that plan was announced, it struck me as pretty audacious…I thought, ‘This may not be the way we want to proceed here.’ Google was unlikely to pay attention to privacy or quality of scans like librarians would,” he said.
He pondered why universities want to contract with the company “to act as a custodian for hundreds of years of knowledge” and spoke about the fascinating role that Google’s “don’t be evil” motto plays in business and technology.
“It’s part of the lore,” he said. “It’s part of the story you get.”
“I maintain to this day it is that sin that matters when we deal with Google,” he added. “There’s this weird assumption that good actually rose out of brilliance. This story to me was fairly incomplete,” he said. “What was missing from this story was the fact that, for instance, Sergey Brin and Larry Page worked on a grant from the National Science Foundation to develop what became PageRank.”
Thus, the public helped fund the project that eventually became Google, and it now contributes the data critical to the company’s success.
“We do a tremendous amount of interaction with Google that constantly improves Google,” Vaidhyanathan said.
No other search engine company can truly compete, because there are none that are as well equipped. And no other company boasts “the sunken infrastructure” that Google has, he observed.
“The question is, ‘How are we making Google smarter?’” he added. “And we’re making Google smarter with every click.”
But computer clicks don’t make up the entire picture.
“There is no such thing as a neutral algorithm,” Vaidhyanathan said.
“Human beings do make decisions at Google,” he said. “Human beings make decisions what the algorithm cares about. It’s not just the computers.”
Indeed, Google shows different search results depending on location and “learns” the preferences of users who have Google accounts.
“What this does is, of course, narrow our field of vision, because we’re outsourcing our decision making to Google exponentially, which is much better for shopping but much worse for learning,” he said.
A problem universities, libraries and public schools face, he argued, is a “public failure.” Without the government providing all the necessary resources for these institutions, Google can force change when it takes over the work that the public sector isn’t necessarily doing.
“Really what we see here is Google on the Web as a largely benevolent Caesar,” he said.
“Google is essentially the sovereign of the Web,” he added. “Google is ruling the Web for us.”
“We’re not far enough into history,” said community member Hazem Nassar, who referred to Vaidhyanathan’s comparison of Google to Caesar.
“This is all very recent, and the rate of change is very fast,” Nassar said. “Google came out, and now they’re afraid of Facebook. I’d like to hear more of what he has to say about open source, especially making libraries more accessible.”