Google is not merely changing our societies, lives, relationships, and worldviews; it is probably changing even our brains in ways we can only begin to calculate, writes Jeff Jarvis in ‘ WhatWould Google Do? ’ (www.landmarkonthenet.com).
Today’s young people, ‘Generation Google,’ will have an evolving understanding and experience of friendship as the Internet will not let them lose touch with the people in their lives, he foresees. “With their blogs, MySpace pages, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Seesmic conversations, Twitter feeds, and all the means for sharing their lives yet to be invented, they will leave lifelong Google tracks that will make it easier to find them.”
It will no longer be easy to escape our pasts, to act like cads and run away, the author cautions. “More threads will tie more of us together longer than in any time since the bygone days when we lived all our lives in small towns.” Posing a rhetorical question whether this abundance of friendship can make our relationships shallower, he answers in the negative, because ‘friendship finds its natural water level – we know our capacity for relationships and stick closest to those we like best.’
What about our embarrassments? Will they live on? Our missteps, youthful mistakes, and indiscretions will be more public and permanent, haunting us for the rest of our lives because the world, thanks to Google, has a better memory, observes Jarvis. He hinges hope, however, on an insight of David Weinberger, that an age of transparency must be an age of forgiveness.
“Our new publicness may make us more emphatic and ultimately forgiving of each others’ and even of public figures’ faults and foibles. We see that already. Barack Obama said he inhaled and no one gasped. Who are we to throw stones when Google moves us all into glass towns? In Googley terms: Life is a beta.”
Publicness is a community asset, the author avers. The crowd owns the wisdom of the crowd, he adds. “And to withhold information from that collective knowledge – a link, a restaurant rating, a bit of advice – may be a new definition of anti-social or at least selfish behaviour.”
Despite all the facility that the Net offers everybody to create blogs and albums, it doesn’t make us more creative, feels Jarvis. “Instead, it enables what we create to be seen, heard, and used. It enables every creator to find a public, the public he or she merits.” On this, though, there can be two views, he concedes: One, the argument that Google and the Internet bring society to ruin because they rob the creative class of its financial support and exclusivity; and the other view, that the Internet opens up creativity past one-size-fits-all, mass measurements and priestly definitions of quality.
“The playing field is flat. To stand out, one must rise on worth – as defined by the public rather than the priests – and the reward is attention. That is our culture of links and search. It is a meritocracy, only now there are many definitions of merit and each must be earned.”
Imperative read.
