ReadingNotes

The Dark Side Of Google

The Dark Face of Google by the Ippolita Collective - ISBN 8807710277 - Feltrinelli 2007

Motivation

Numerous debates (leading to GoogleIsEvil) on the potential risk of Google business model being to resell information about its users to commercial actors.

Pre-reading model

Draw a schema (using PmGraphViz or another solution) of the situation of the area in the studied domain before having read the book.

Reading

Introduction
Chapter 1 The History of Search (Engines)
- "since usage of the service [GMail] was spreading by way on invites already registered users could freely extent in her circle, Google obtained crucial information on individual networks of friends and acquaintances." (p14)
Chapter 2 BeGoogle!
- 3 The War of Standards, see Chapter 9 Waging a Standards War of Information Rules
Chapter 3 Google Open Source
- see also RMLL-LSM and Seedea:Seedea/Licenses
Chapter 4 Algorithms or Bust!
- "algorithms aren't some kind of arcane procedures concerning and known only to a handful of specialists, they are devices that profoundly influence our daily lives, much more so than would appear at first sight." (p40)
  - see also my earlier proposal Person#SociallyShapingAlgorithms
Chapter 5 As bonus: other funky functionalities
- "Google's spider is constantly busy copying the Internet into its database" (p52) is actually wrong, it's copying a fraction of the Web, that's just a fraction of the Internet, for example it does not include torrents
- "the search shows no coherence with the body of data extent on that indexed part of network." (p52) that I experience on a daily basis based on how often my own content (including) this page is indexed (as seen in the traffic logs) and how "old" the actual search results are
- The 'strategy of objectivity' pursued by Google emphasizes scientific research, academic excellence, technological superiority, and sophisticated interfaces. But) This is merely a veil occulting the frightening prospect of a single access point to all data generated by naive users." (p58)
Chapter 6 Quality, Quantity, Relation
- mention of epistemology and the limit of "objective and fast" search versus conducting the research process yourself
Chapter 7 Technocracy
- "what we witness, is an enforced extension of the peer review system - which works all right within the academic system" (p67)
  - even that seems debatable according not just to practitioners cf HplusSummitHarvard and Publish or Perish (PoP) by Anne-Wil Harzing but also by epistemologists (Paul Feyerabend and late Imre Lakatos)
- between these two extremes, techno-hate and techno-craze, it should be possible to advance the curiosity which is associated with the hacker ethic, viz. the sharing of knowledge, the critical attitude towards 'truths', the rigorous verification of sources, all that while going for the way of open knowledge and free circulation of information." (p67)
- "The hybrid [natural and cultural] character of networks is the necessary consequence of of the hybrid character of the technology itself." (p69)
- mention of cryptography and the Freenet project
Conclusion
- "Google pushes this feedback loop logic to its extremes: it is an extraordinary machine that manufactures itself through the very use its users make of it. In this sense it is an 'autopoetic' machine, which accumulates all base information millions of users insert daily into the Web (such as names, pictures, e-mails, search preferences, membership of forums, blog writings and readings, filling in of forms and surveys, browsing trajectories, etc.) and uses it for targeted, 'capillary' advertising. " (p75)
  - as developed by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, cf TreeOfKnowledge and Wikipedia:Enaction

Overall remarks and questions

this? that?

Synthesis

So in the end, it was about X and was based on Y.

Critics

Point A, B and C are debatable because of e, f and j.

Vocabulary

(:new_vocabulary_start:) new_word (:new_vocabulary_end:)

Post-reading model

Draw a schema (using PmGraphViz or another solution) of the situation of the area in the studied domain after having read the book. Link it to the pre-reading model and align the two to help easy comparison.

Fabien Benetou's PIM