Googled: The End of the World as We Know It. Ken Auletta, New York: The Penguin Press, 2009.
Recently I returned to the small Michigan town where I spent my childhood in order to attend a high school reunion. My classmates were excited about my adult life – TV work, Harvard and MIT studies, travel globally with an International Media Commission. One fellow shouted as I was leaving, “How can I learn more about your activities?” I replied, without even thinking, “Google me!”
I had, like many others, turned the noun “Google” into a verb.
Most agree with Hal Varian at Google that the Internet has made information available, but it’s Google’s search engine that has made all this information accessible.
Google’s algorithms and global computer storage have also empowered a corporate giant. It handles more than 3 billion searches daily. Google’s advertising revenues – more than twenty billion dollars a year – account for 40 percent of all the advertising dollars spent online. Google News aggregates twenty-five thousand news sites daily. And as it continues to digitize libraries with its Google Books project the company appears headed to be the sole gateway to almost all the world’s books.
How did all this happen? It has been chronicled several times in books but Ken Auletta is uniquely positioned to analyze all of it here in the context of new and old media. His previous books on the networks and on Microsoft’s legal battles, as well as his articles in The New Yorker magazine, have given him the understanding and analytical skills to trace the Google story perceptively.
First, to grasp the breadth of the Google empire: it does searches; it developed its own operating system (Chrome OS); it has unveiled a mobile phone (Nexus One); it owns YouTube; it is moving into cloud computing; it has an operating system for tablet PCs (Android); it is offering answer highlighting and rich snippets (to enrich its search). And there’s Google Earth and Maps and Images and Finance and Arts and Sports and Health and the above-mentioned Google Books.
This book is a rich and readable chronological history of Google with too much material to review here. I have selected two aspects of the story I suspect will be of special interest to Communication Research Trends readers – Google’s impact on ‘old’ media and its efforts to digitize all the books in the world for easy access (and its own profit.)
Here are some new media/old media clashes (often with Google in the middle):
Old media advertising revenues and agencies are declining dramatically as Google and other online sites offer advertising. Google’s PageRank positions its ads on the basis of traffic and its auctions for ads are run online, with no ad reps, no negotiations, no relationships. Google Analytics allows advertisers to track clicks and sales and effectiveness.
Newspaper circulation and ad revenues are dropping precipitously while Google News aggregates news stories with links back to the original source. Thus all these stories are free on Google while journalism struggles to maintain quality as jobs disappear.
Traditional professional storytellers on TV have been seriously challenged by “user-generated” content in social networks; more and more people are viewing media on computers or mobile devices, while TV networks slip.
Some of the most interesting data analysis in Auletta’s book relate to the convergence and synergy as new and old media confront and challenge each other. Google’s personnel are mainly engineers and its founders believe it’s virtuous to share. This embraces the concept by Eric Steven Raymond in his paper “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.” “Instead of a solitary engineering wizard crafting software as if it were a cathedral, releasing it when perfected … this new model was more like ‘a great babbling bazaar’ igniting the creativity of engineers and users.” The two founders have been described as “Montessori kids” taught to think for themselves. All Google employees are urged to use 20% of their time to work on projects of their own choice; a huge percentage of new Google projects are developed in this “free” time.
And, now, the emergence of Google Books [www.books.google.com]. In 2005 Google began digitizing millions of books, in cooperation with major research libraries. It has now become clear that, with E-books and Tablets, we simply don’t know just how many ways we will be reading books in the future. There’s no doubt digitization will provide access to books; it will also allow getting more out of books. All this is of great interest (globally) to researchers, librarians, authors, publishers, educators, and readers-at-large. Google has announced a new format for downloads (EPUB), allowing text to conform to smaller screens.
But engineers need to look up from their computer algorithms to see that this raises many questions:
… What about copyright? How will authors’ incomes be assured?
… How can a reader’s privacy be safeguarded?
… If Google alone becomes the portal, what about monopoly concerns?
… If books are ranked by request numbers only, how can we rank quality?
… In this kind of mass production, how can bibliographic concerns be met?
As authors and publishers challenged Google in Court a Settlement was reached. But now this Settlement is being challenged and may be litigated for years to come.
Auletta notes that hubris exists within the Google culture. But he concludes:
Nowhere in the three billion daily searches it provides … or the more than twenty million books it plans to digitize, will we find another company that has swept so swiftly across the media horizon. (p. 336)