Without Google

Does “Google”, because of it’s monstrous power represent any internet infrastructure that obsessively tracks our online life, by means of a vast deployment of digital service and arms?

In this sense, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, Cisco, or any other also fall on the same spectrum.

Should we ban these companies from our lives? What other options do we have?

For starters, we have to realize that technology is part of our culture. Whether this means “owned by corporations” and whether this is relevant, is something that we have to seriously consider.

• Is it necessary for the internet to be controlled by a few?
• Does “global” or “world wide web” mean some sort of centralised or unified control over data?
• How would the net structure have to be in order to allow for a variety of local services, akin to local traditions, that can also connect to other local services anywhere? This is means, for example, having a Brooklyn search engine that is also able to connect to a Buenos Aires engine by means of some sort of interface that considers both locale, instead of having a global search engine that deals with these to cities in the same way, disregarding culture, heritage, folklore, laws, and more.
• This leads me to think that the reason of why there is such a cultural homogenization is because of companies like google that uniformly shape the access to all data, independently of geography, history, local events, etc. This is, the interface, is always the same. This can be graphical, where the whole world can “start searching” through Google’s famous search Box, or procedural: the same steps to arrive to totally different kinds of information, where almost everybody that searches through Google will arrive at a reasonable useful resources, or webpage, in less than 3 clicks and a query results screen that is always attempting to guess and show the best result in the first page of the results, or even in the first 3 results.
  This does not differ too much with other engines, even the ones that promise not to track your activity.
  I believe this process impacts research processes. Much of the “trying to look for something” is the actual search: going from A to B along the straightest line possible might mean missing out on details or side-information that could enrich the research.
  The flow of human conversation is is full of these. I’m not saying that internet search stops at the first engine results. That is will definitively be a very light research. But the kind of idea branching that could sprout from conversation is totally different to that of a Google results page.
  MoreOver if you take into account that, since Google is always trying to customize results to your profile, you are going to find yourself always researching in, rather than opening up to new findings outside your “profile scope”. You end up always searching inside your own bubble.

But let’s think about some of the practical, everyday implications of an outage of internet-based services. Or even internet itself: a ¿dystopian? world where all that is left to conquer, technologically, is global and local ¿digital? , ¿wireless?, communications. Suddenly, defining the internet by it’s physicality is not that easy: an ocean-wide fiber-optics tunnel is just an evolution of a mechanical relay telegraph system. The same happens with satellite communication. So we need not to define internet as the objects that make it possible, or even as the evolution of communication system, but rather as the global cultural implications that it presents.

[Note to me: doesn’t this happen with everything? Especially technological evolution, which has a big impact on cultural evolution]

A World of: Post-its….LOTS OF POST-ITs…!!

Why? Am I naturalizing that any sort of “internet” should have endless amounts of data, all at the same level of reachability (which of course does not happen nowadays (Deep Web, Search engine “know the user” automatic customization), Political barriers (like China’s Golden Shiel Project), and others that I know nothing about )?

I thinking about a city wrapped in Post-it notes that describe the path to stuff. The notes are hyperLinks, but are definitively much more difficult too follow than web links.

They contain drawings, addresses, names, odours, stickers and millions of resources to guide. Well, these notes will eventually turn into e-paper, or…. giant LED Advertising boards.