Google knows your need before you ask
Along with questions about fairness to
advertisers and competitors, Google's current approach to web searching raises
another issue: the tailoring of information for consumers. You and I can type
the same keywords into Google and get vastly different results. This
personalization is ostensibly a service to us.
But are machines able to determine what is relevant
information for us and what is not? Is it possible to embed algorithms with a
sense of civic responsibility or journalistic ethics?
The Internet is often described as a radically democratic
mechanism that strengthens our communicative sinews. But this notion of the web
as a tool of interconnectivity is becoming mythology. "Going online" means
entering not a global conversation so much as an informational space created by
algorithms that pick up dozens (Eli Pariser argues 57)
of personality indicators in order to deliver the search results that you want
to see.
But what about what you should
see? Do we really want our search results to reinforce our existing preferences
and biases?
Pariser, author of The
Filter Bubble, puts
it well:
If algorithms are going to curate
the world for us...then we need to make sure that they're not just keyed to
relevance. We need to make sure that they also show us things that are
uncomfortable or challenging or important...other points of view.
The problem is that we don't even realize how much is edited
out--there is the illusion of choice, the illusion that we are the ones
deciding how we navigate the available information.
And soon even the search bar may be obsolete, further
diminishing our agency. Google's Eric Schmidt said this last year:
One idea is that more and more
searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type. . . . I actually
think most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google
to tell them what they should be doing next.
Are we comfortable with this assumption? Comparisons to Jesus Christ
aside, Google seems to be developing a Big Brother complex.
