[iDC] Are We Google's Paint?

Wed Jan 28 11:02:06 UTC 2009

what I would like to see happen with social bookmarking, is automated help that shows which other tags are 'closest' to the one we are using, and so create very specific clouds of tags that lead to similar material,

Michel

________________________________
From: Anna Munster <A.Munster at unsw.edu.au>
To: Michael Bauwens <michelsub2003 at yahoo.com>
Cc: Frank Pasquale <frank.pasquale at gmail.com>; iDC at mailman.thing.net
Sent: Tuesday, January 27, 2009 7:43:46 AM
Subject: Re: [iDC] Are We Google's Paint?

many thanks for those tags Michael - very useful! Once I systematize my delicious site by propery bundling - I'll see what I 've got!
cheers
Anna

On 27/01/2009, at 11:38 AM, Michael Bauwens wrote:

Certainly inadequate to the task you propose, but I have collated critical and other material here through http://delicious.com/mbauwens/Google

Any other tags on Google that tag criticisms?

Michel

 The P2P Foundation researches, documents and promotes peer to peer alternatives.

Wiki and Encyclopedia, at http://p2pfoundation.net; Blog, at http://blog.p2pfoundation.net; Newsletter, at http://integralvisioning.org/index.php?topic=p2p

Basic essay at http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=499; interview at http://poynder.blogspot.com/2006/09/p2p-very-core-of-world-to-come.html; video interview, at http://www.masternewmedia.org/news/2006/09/29/network_collaboration_peer_to_peer.htm

________________________________
From: Anna Munster <A.Munster at unsw.edu.au>
To: Michael Bauwens <michelsub2003 at yahoo.com>
Cc: Frank Pasquale <frank.pasquale at gmail.com>; iDC at mailman.thing.net
Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2009 12:09:51 PM
Subject: Re: [iDC] Are We Google's Paint?

Thanks for the post Michael and also to Frank's original musings.

I have to say I agree with Michael's comments but I also think we need to delve deeper into Lessig's analogy and deeper into our analysis of Google.

First the paint-Leonardo/content-Google analogy. Not only is it dangerous but it's just plain stupid, I'm afraid and I have to say shows a completely inadequate understanding of the history of media and mediation. Paint is NOT content but rather a medium...although, of course, the relation between media and content is by no means separable (in spite of Greenberg and the history of American modernist theory in the second part of the 20thC). 

However, paint is also not  a medium but a material and one which da Vinci himself influenced. In fact, we could say that his experimentation with techniques for boiling oil and combining with bees wax enabled him to set lighter coloured pigments and therefore helped develop a tonal range for his paintings that were part of his 'creativity' (god I hate that word!!). Certainly his experiments with oil paint influenced the development and application of painting. So, da Vinci did not just go and get his 'content' from elsewhere he was a material experimenter. I have to say I really hate ill-informed metaphors drawn from the history of art.

To extend this to more contemporary times, we could also say that experimentation with data and its imbrication in interfaces, applications and architecture within the Web 2.0 environment does in fact mean that content producers are consistently driving the real development of something like the Google architecture/machine. Collective shapings of Google Maps' APIs for example have certainly seen mapping, Google and its potentialities shift in weird and wonderful ways quite unforseen by Google itself.

The problem is, and I think this is also what Michael is proposing, the economic, cultural and political value of the force of such collective content production upon networked architecture is neither valued nor measured by Google (although it is certainly stored and accumulated for future ventures). Google's epistemo-political sleight of hand is to help remap the knowledge economy as a division of labour between 'architecture' vs. content, with architecture the province of the post-fordist corporation and content 'free' for everyone else to produce.  It is this 'dispositif' that requires rigorous criticism.

Unfortunately I still find really hard hitting critiques of Google itself hard to come by. I'm aware of all the more general post Fordist work and of course critiques of Google with respect to its data collection arm and privacy issues.  But no one in the English speaking world has really undertaken a very thorough analysis of Google's many arms and aspects ( I know Michael Zimmer has a book out and Siva Vaidhyanathan is working on the Googlization of Everything). But I am still not convinced that this work does much more than go beyond the now overstated issues of privacy, ubiquity etc. I'll be interested to see Siva's book when it comes out as it promises to be more comprehensive.

But what about a post-network media studies analysis of Google?? I'm not seeing much around...

This tends to apply to the art world's relation to Google as well with one of the only really hard hitting pieces on Google being 'Google will Eat itself' (http://gwei.org/index.php). The irony of course is that Google does eat itself and then it just turns its own shit into search results!!

I also wrote a piece for the new CTheory reader in Critical Digital Studies on Google Earth called: 'Welcome to Google Earth'. A pdf is available at:
http://staff.cofa.unsw.edu.au/~annamunster/people/

But is anyone aware of other theoretically rigorous analysis? 

cheers
Anna

On 20/01/2009, at 8:00 PM, Michael Bauwens wrote:

Thanks Frank,

I think Lessig's metaphor is dangerous, because it implies that the Google docs, written by all of us, since most of the invisible (i.e. officially produced) web is not accessible via Google, are in fact just as worthless as paint ... This is not the case, but Google and other platforms do add a network effect to their original value.

So, certainly, all of us who produce documents for google, photo's for flickr, and videos for youtube are creating direct use value of our own, but Google creates on top of that, value out of aggegration and by building a platform which both enables it, extracts added layers of intelligence from it, and funds it plus makes a profit out of selling scarcity-driven extra value to the marketplace of 'attention'.

What is significant, is that people do create their own use value directly, without passing through the marketplace, but that new players find ways to monetize it, so we have a reconfiguration of 'workers' into peer producers, and capital owners into 'netarchical capitalists', who only marginally rely on intellectual property (but they do protect some data and added layers to keep them scarce, though they do this through secrecy and non-access rather than through IP) in their strategies.

This creates new fields of tension, which I have attempted to describe here:

The social web and its social contracts. Re-public, . Retrieved from http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=261

________________________________
From: Frank Pasquale <frank.pasquale at gmail.com>
To: iDC at mailman.thing.net
Sent: Monday, January 19, 2009 11:44:10 AM
Subject: [iDC] Are We Google's Paint?

Hi list,
Over the past few days I've been dipping into Cory Doctorow's Content, David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous, and Larry Lessig's Remix. I like them all for different reasons; Doctorow is an irrepressible enthusiast for online openness, Weinberger connects that openness to older patterns of information storage and retrieval, and Lessig sings of the creativity it can unleash.
Anyone thinking deeply about the new relationships between art and commerce created by the internet should consult Lessig's book; it's beautifully written and animated by a strong moral vision of what the net can be.  However, this quote from Lessig provoked me:
"Some draw a downright foolish conclusion from the fact that Google's value gets built upon other people's content. Andrew Keen, for example . . . writes 'Google is a parasite: it creates no content of its own.' But in the same sense you could say that all of the value in the Mona Lisa comes from the paint, that Leonardo da Vinci was just a 'parasite' upon the hard work of the paint makers. That statement is true in the sense that but for the paint, there would be no Mona Lisa. But it is false if it suggests that da Vinci wasn't responsible for the great value the Mona Lisa is. . . "
"The complete range of Google products is vast. But . . . practically everything Google offers helps Google build an extraordinary database of knowledge about what people want, and how those wants relate to the web. Every click you make in the Google universe adds to that database. With each click, Google gets smarter." (127-128)
The picture/paint metaphor is a provocative one. Is Lessig vividly illustrating the new economy mantra that information is rapidly being commoditized? I've always thought of Google as an aid to helping me find things--a utility that mixes elements of a telecom carrier and a card catalog index. Does Google's supervenient value of organizing the web by query really make it as much more meaningful, more expressive, than the content it indexes, as the Mona Lisa is more meaningful than paint? I know few people searching for search results, so I'll conclude that's not a good interpretation.
Another way of glossing the metaphor is to deem Google the "Lord of the Memes," because, as David Brooks wryly observes, "prestige has shifted from the producer of art to the aggregator and the appraiser." I like this interpretation because it complements Lessig's characterization of Google as "getting smarter" with every click.
Indeed it is--but it's also getting more powerful, more capable of framing your window on the world. We may celebrate a world where we can all personalize our search results, and where each of us has a chance to fight for salience in Google results on a topic (rather than pray for a New York Times editor to pull our editorial out of the slushpile). But do we really understand how that salience is determined? Is there any objective answer to how it should be done? And as in so much of our weightless economy online, isn't the perception of relevance really the reality?
To his credit, Lessig has been more frank than most fans of Silicon Valley about the dangers this power poses (as this Jeffrey Rosen article notes):
"During the heyday of Microsoft, people feared that the owners of the operating systems could leverage their monopolies to protect their own products against competitors," says the Internet scholar Lawrence Lessig of Stanford Law School. "That dynamic is tiny compared to what people fear about Google. They have enormous control over a platform of all the world's data, and everything they do is designed to improve their control of the underlying data. If your whole game is to increase market share, it's hard to do good, and to gather data in ways that don't raise privacy concerns or that might help repressive governments to block controversial content."
So perhaps we are left with the idea that Google does some good things, and some bad things--and that Lessig's new cause of anti-corruption activism is designed to produce a government capable of promoting the former and curbing the latter.
Anyway, I'm just wondering what types more creative than myself think of this implicit ordering of creative work and the technology that makes it accessible.

--Frank

Frank Pasquale
Visiting Professor of Law, Yale Law School

PS: I have links and a bit more analysis of the issue here:
http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2009/01/the_picture_and.html#more

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A/Prof. Anna Munster
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School of Art History and Art Education
College of Fine Arts
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