2-16-09 Part 1

Journalism 201 ? 2/16/09 Topic: Internet Culture/Digital and Interactive Media Where do you want to work when you grow up? Get a job at Google Is Google making us stupid August 2008 article in Atlantic by Nicholas Carr "For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind." But "My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words, now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski." Some terms Computer automation Working alone with the computer in "batch" (you watch for computer) The ENIAC was used to solve mathematical problems about ballistics and etc. It was programmable in that you could rewire it to do something new Computers automating work and replacing human labor Took too long or was too tedious for humans to do Computer augmentation "talking back" to the computer in realtime (computer waits for you) Computer augmenting your though and improving human labor They augment our very thought and skills and improve our work instead of replacing us at the workers Douglas Englebart (1968) Real-time videoconference He was working on a project called "Augmented Human Intellect" Used a wooden block for a computer mouse (had 3 buttons) Chording keyboard - 5 sliding keys to create the multiple characters that you would need to use Felt that the most highly paid citizens would be using those Hypermedia (multimedia + hyperlinks) Digitized audio, video, text "multimedia" documents combine audio, video, text What looks like a piece of paper, but there are multiple forms of media embedded in these documents "metadata" about these documents allows search Metadata is data about data?where all of the files come from and what makes up each individual file "hypertext" links connect these documents in specific ways If two documents are somehow related, they should be able to be linked together The paper link was the "footnote" so you can connect information and show where it came from Implies that the humans create the links with reason Not just randomly created between documents Knowledge Navigator (1987) Computers should not only augment our work and information, but also that the computer should watch what we do, and be able to anticipate our needs and suggest things to us because it knows a lot about us Interactivity Being able to interact with a "smart" computer Being able to interact with other computer users Social networking sites Being able to interact with complex content Putting up graphs, videos, maps and being able to use them Allowing the computer (and other computer users) to know something about you The "paperclip" on Microsoft Word Google knows what we searched for last time, so when we type in a letter, other searches come back up ACLU (2010) Are we letting our privacy be compromised? Digital convergence Convergence of all data content in digital format Numbers, text, sound, pictures, video Convergence of all media technologies with computers Books, TV, radio, telephone Convergence of all corporations dealing with these types of content and technologies Apple Computer, Time Warner, New York Times, Disney Convergence of all social processes dealing with these types of content and technologies News, education, entertainment, personal communication Google Sergey Brin and Larry Page started it "Google's mission is to make the world's information universally accessbile and useful" 112 languages, tens of billions of web pages, hundreds of millions of queries each day "the perfect search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want" Both automation and augmentation Google Information Model Hardware: PC's They could get bigger and scale up Process: GoogleBot Web crawlers that check every website on the web Algorithm: PageRank Links = value With the more links to a page, the more value it has so the higher it ranks on the response list Need to either be linked to a lot of people or to a very influential source to be highly ranked "Democracy on the web works" "thousands of experiments a day" [Carr N 2008] They see how we search and they adjust and learn "an artificial intelligence?on a large scale" [Page L 2007] To make Google so smart that it knows what we want from even the most flimsy of searches Only the "visible web" Not subscription databases Google Business Model Free to users Brand loyalty/ word of mouth "ad words" and "ad sense" But no rich media ads License technology to other firms Post dot-com-crash IPO They are turning a profit "you can make money without doing evil" 25% to 50% of visitors to online stores use search through Google Type in Best Buy and the link to the site comes up, it's just easier Arms race with "Search Engine Optimization" firms Need to structure the page so that Google picks it up as important and ranks it high among the list PageRank is well known but their other algorithms are unknown Google Growth Model Spin-off indexes for particular kinds of content Google Images, Google Scholar, Google Blog Search Digitizing content Google Books, Google newspaper Aggregating content Google News Capturing user-generated content Blogger, YouTube Geocoding content Google Maps, Google Earth Your ubiquitous mobile cloud Android and GMail