Saturday, November 12, 2005

Is Google already passe

I read recently of the success of www.milliondollarhomepage.com. The argument for its success is given in it having been both a simple and a novel idea. Once a bit of media exposure was given advertisers, those keen-eyed hawks, saw a way of circumventing how people (and potential customers) usually find their websites i.e. through Google. In effect the media and the way it works proved more powerful than Google in this case.

But I am wondering if the site's novelty speaks to a growing disenchantment with the way Google etc are organising the Internet for us. Because what seems to me to be particularly "sticky" about the site is that it, at least for a moment, organises the Internet according to a new set of principles and one would find something unexpected and therefore "new" and enchanting.

Before Google there were a number of very interesting experiments in trying to organise the Internet as people realised that the sheer scale of the content available online posed unprecedented challenges in organising it (see http://www.cybergeography.org/). Google effectively quashed these early experiments because it solved the most pressing problem of trying to separate high value content from the dross by means of a depersonalising algorithm. Which is also a problem (but at the time less pressing) because how we organise information is intimately tied up with our sense of self... which is also very importantly a sense of our own uniqueness. Hence the rise of the Blog.

So, much like we are unable to find anything approximating a satisfactory expression of our full political identity in our modern democracies because of the way in which they work (and they wonder why there are such low turn outs at polling stations), Google etc are unable to give much in the way to the expression of our individual Internet experience. And I think there is more than a passing similarity between a western democracy and Google besides that oft quoted refrain about the Internet being a true democracy. Both are about dealing with large numbers, and dealing with them by depersonalising (and as I seem to be arguing - dehumanising) the experience.