SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN

I boldly stepped outside of Greg Hall today to attend a talk offered by the Library and Information Sciences Department. I felt the talk, entitled “What’s an Author to Do? Google, Digitization, and the Future of Books”, by Vaidhyanathan, was somewhat scattered, but it was aimed at a Library Sciences audience so that might have been par for the course. The room was certainly packed.

The talk was motivated by the ‘public debate’ between Kevin Kelly and John Updike that played out in the NYT over the issues arising from Google Books. Vaidhyanathan dismissed both positions as ‘technofundamentalist’, which as I understood from the talk is roughly the idea that technological change is a kind of inevitable progress, and that whatever unintended externalities arise due to technological change can be resolved by further technological advancement. Updike was simply less optimistic of the change represented by Google Books, and claimed a nostalgia for the days of book stores and libraries. Instead of offering an alternative to fundamentalism, Vaidhyanathan suggested some important questions worth raising about Google Books that are notably absent from the public debate, with help from Lessig’s discussion of cyberspace IP law. Among the suggestions were all the usual suspects: privacy and confidentiality issues, transparency on Google’s end, a more open discussion of the what, when, and how of digital archiving, and so on.

On the whole, Vaidhyanathan was cautiously optimistic about the prospects of a great big Google Library. He was very critical of Google’s privacy policy (he said there is no privacy), and was generally skeptical of Google’s closed-door, big corporation approach to the archive process. He did give two, I think very helpful, suggestions to the librarians; first, that ink and paper will never be replaced, nor will book sales be negatively affected by the digitization of libraries, and second that Google deserves a lot of credit for organizing and structuring the otherwise chaotic and dynamic internet. He said that Google is “what makes the web a web”.

Despite his critical stance on Google (note: it was chilly out and I wore my beanie instead of my Google hat. Plus, I didn’t want to be ‘that guy’ at the Google talk), Vaidhyanathan gained my respect in many ways, not least of which was the Woody Guthrie picture in his PowerPoint. He also had a rather natural way of talking about Google and the internet, that at times elicited some stifled giggles in the audience but I found to be very comfortable. So I muscled up the courage to ask a question after lecture. My question was basically this:

Vaidhyanathan talked about Google in a variety of different ways during the talk. At various points he described Google as an agent, an institution, a brand, a multinational corporation, and a ‘system’. He suggested that at some point in the future we might come to view Google as a public utility (and voiced support for net neutrality in connection with this), and referrenced the founder’s vision for Google as ‘the mind of God’. (I said that Google is better than God, because Google uses PageRank. I got a couple of groans from that.) My worry was that not all these descriptions are compatible with his criticisms of Google’s behavior with respect to its Book Search. Vaidhyanathan’s response was that he basically wants to use ‘Google’ in all these senses, but that he is most interested in Google as a social phenomenon. He further claimed that no one really understands Google as a social phenomenon, including Google itself.

Although I am extremely sympathetic to that last point, I think his response is not yet sufficient. For instant, towards the end of the talk he raised a question that he thinks has been overlooked in the public discussion: Why now? There is no rush to digitize all these books, which we have kept analog for hundreds of years without problem. Why should we give Google the project if it means compromising certain important principles, like privacy and transparency?

I’m not entirely sure that you can ask “Why now?” questions to social phenomenon. You can describe the circumstances that lead to the development of a social phenomenon, but I think that misses the heart of the question. Why did MTV become popular in the 80s? Well, who really knows. It just happened. Notice that this isn’t a technofundamentalist interpretation of the change, because it isn’t normative. It also doesn’t imply that the change was necessary or inevitable.

It is perfectly reasonable to ask the question of Google as a corporate entity, but then the answer is straightforward: Google stands to make a lot of money on the cheap through this archive project. As a social phenomenon, however, there doesn’t seem to be any immediated answer. Google is the first in what looks to be a long line of websites run off user-generated content that extends through Wikipedia and YouTube. As it turns out, the content-creating public seems to respond well to this paradigm, and in the process has made some very successful websites work really well. Furthermore, it just happens to be the case that the public is generally not disturbed by the IP and privacy issues that arise from this exchange, and so companies like Google can get away with ethically and legally questionable practices without undermining it popularity. As these events transpired, Google realized that it is in its interest to acquire as much content as it can, and the national libraries were an untapped resource of information.

But again, we are using ‘Google’ in a loose way, and this threatens to confuse our understanding of it as a social phenomenon. Google the corporation stands to make lots of money, and Google the legal entity is getting away with questionable legal/ethical practices. These two senses are probably more or less synonymous. But Google the intelligent system (including both its algorithms and its engineers) is what made Google successful as a social phenomenon, and that seems to be entirely independent of its status as a legal entity. Furthermore, it is Google the intelligent system that we interact with on a daily basis- it is the system that we know and use and care about.

The most compelling way of talking about Google is as an ‘agent’, which I think is entirely appropriate. I think it is in the interest of Google the agent to acquire content. But discussing Google in terms of agency elides these distinctions, and so debates can get confusing. I’ve said it before, so I’ll say it again: I think this highlights the deep theoretical problems with the contemporary discussion of technology, and I dont think that a focus on particular instances here helps clarify these problems. Furthermore, I think resolving these theoretical difficulties can be done without succumbing to technofundamentalism, as Vaidhyanathan fears.

I hope he agrees.