Talking TO Us, Talking FOR Us - Google's Never Ending Expansion

In The Googlization of Everything, Vaidhyanathan lays out the quandary and rather complicated conversation surrounding the growing scope of Google. Google's mission statement is "To organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible." (10) This has expanded past just a efficient and effective search engine, but to a little bit of everything, everywhere. 

Vaidhyanathan argues that this posses serious issues for our perspective on the world and everything in it. Sure, Google has given us great products and given us greater access to a connected world. Vaidhyanathan doesn't deny this; "Google figured out how to manage abundance while every other media company in the world was trying to manufacture scarcity, and for that we should be grateful" (11). But he also tries to draw our attention to the other, less shiny, effects of 'googlization'; "It's a process of collecting, ranking, linking and displaying knowledge determines what we consider to be good, valuable and relevant. The stakes could not be higher" (7). As we discussed in class, Google is sticking its toe in every pond - perhaps falling into the (modified) cliche 'Jack of all Trades - Master of some.' According to Vaidhyanathan, this means that all our information, knowledge and even interactions are being processed through Google and that this is too many of our eggs in one basket.

These two Huffington post articles show two more of these vertical expansion of Google. The technology of the "smart shoes" revealed at South by Southwest conference. They use several different technologies to create, basically, a personal trainer in your shoes. This may seem a little ridiculous, Google even acknowledges this, saying of the prototype, "Our goal is really to figure out how you marry innovation in technology with marketing and advertising." But, it is undeniably cool technology and won't just disappear from Google and the tech world's radar. Nor will the mindset of mixing tech and profit.

Google Now was also recently released. It is a voice command system for smart phones. Interestingly it is available on Apple devices as well. It functions much like Apple's Siri voice assistant. Though Jesdanun says "its power lies in giving you information you need to know before you have to ask." Tapping into your Google account to give more specialized and 'better' results. 

Both of these technologies demonstrate Google's ever expanding reach. Infiltrating every aspect of our interaction with technology. This is exactly what Vaidhyanathan is afraid of - that we will be so caught up in the cool and ease of it all that we will forget to calculate the costs, however distant. Additionally, Google has moved beyond its mission statement from so long ago. As we have discussed, they are not giving us a product but rather we are their product and they will continue to expand within the bounds we as consumers and producers of their product allow. If we are not careful, as Vaidhyanathan urges, soon they will not only be talking at us, but for us. And perhaps worst of all, we may not know the difference.

(Apologies: I continually tried to insert a video but it wouldn't work, so you can find it here.)