Slashdot Mirror
The Googlewashing Of Our Language
KIondike writes "The Register talks about how a term ("Second Superpower") coined by the anti-war culture suddenly got radically neutered and altered by a weblog that a lot of people link to. Searching for the term on Google now brings up his blog and other people talking about his blog for the first several entries. Can Google's power to give information to the people be misused and perverted? This only took 42 days." First the widespread usage of "googling" to mean web searching, and now this.
... who does not see a huge difference between the two definitions of the phrase "Second Superpower"?
Mmmm.. Donuts
As a libertarian I've become well-acquainted with the "hijacking" of terminology -- to the point of which it becomes exceedingly difficult to discuss some subjects because the people discussing it may not be talking about the same thing...
One example of this is the term "liberal". Once upon a time this had a very different meaning, and "classical liberalism", while on some issues resembles modern liberalism, is very different on many others. I doubt someone like Tom Paine would agree with much of what today's Democratic party supports.
Another example is "anarchy". To the Republicans, it's equated with chaos and a lack of any form of control, though in actuality it's meant to describe a social system that relies on self-control. To the socialists, it could only mean "classical anarchy", or "anarchosocialism", a sort of communist utopia. Libertarians often support "anarchocapitalism", where people can own the means to production.
The term "libertarianism" has been similarly obscured in meaning. Socialists have attempted to claim it for their own in the past. Many people, including the leadership of the Libertarian party, consider it equivalent to minarchism, while other influential people seek to equate the term to a restriction against the initiation of force. Meanwhile, other organizations also wish to subsume the term.
That seems to be what the entire article amounts to: "Gosh, we were trying to create this "meme" that large global gatherings of communists, students, and people without jobs were some mysterious force known as a 'Second Superpower,' and then someone went off and used those words in an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT WAY without asking our permition! It's not fair not fair not fair! How DARE they used free speech differently than we do?"
This is news? (I know, it's a slashdot story, so it has no requirement to even resemble news.) Whatever happened to "the cure for speech you disagree with is more speech"? It's not like anyone has a copyright on a silly phrase like "Second Superpower." Get a grip already...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I read the article, and it looks like one big whine to me, that could be summed up as "Some other small social group stomped the arbitrary phrase that my small social group created." Ho hum, so what? I had never heard that phrase until I read it today in Slashdot.
Unlike some other posters who also commented on this story, I do believe the polls that claim 70%+ support for the war among americans. I run in a number of real life social circles, and some of these social circles are rabidly anti-war. They make the same claims about made up polls and mass media conspiracies. The funny thing is, most of these people choose to include only other liberals in their group of friends. A side effect of that choice is that they don't have any friends who support the war. That side effect of their personal choices gives them a very skewed view of overall public opinion. I'm not so selective of friends, and I know far more people who support the war than who oppose it.
Call me a skeptic, but I think it takes longer than 42 days (and the limited audience of blogs) to coin the meaning of a new term. I've never heard this term used before I read this article. It seems to me new word definitions come about because of a need for them, not some strange, perverted miss-use of google.
I guess I'm a little confused by the article. Is the author saying there is some causation of this new word meaning stemming from Google? If so, that is their any apreciable percentage of the populace doing google searches each time they encounter a new word? If Google is merely a tool to tell us the more accepted definition of a word, then is google really an accurate tool for this?
Sorry, but I see this a very weakly supported theory, and don't think it deserves enough attention to have been posted to slashdot.
AccountKiller
"Google is the Next Big Thing"
Permit me to disagree. Google *was* the next big thing.
This page-ranking nonsense almost guarantees that hard to find things remain hard to find. Why? Because the easier to find things float to the top (people have *found* them and linked to them).
I already have to include -this and -that all the time to get rid of the common junk that I *don't* need to search for.
A.
...bringing you cynical quips since 1998
I read the article (yeah, yeah, I know) and several times they mention Orwell's newspeak, and how the totalitarian state would try to co-opt the meaning of words, to redefine them, and reshape public opinion to their liking. People respond to keywords, so if you know how someone is going to respond to a certain keyword, and then you can associate that keyword to something else, people will project their feelings about the keyword towards the "something else." Kind of like how since September 11th, everybody wants to call anything they don't like "terrorism," and try to link everything from driving an SUV to smoking pot to file sharing (!!) to terrorists. I'm just waiting for the next time I'm at the movies and the guy behind me won't stop talking. I think I'll call him a "whisper terrorist."
Anyway, I digress. So, the protesters are pissed off because they think this blogger re-defined their "Second Superpower" bit. Well, hello, protesters, you did it first. People associate "Superpower" with powerful nations like the US or the former USSR. Somebody that, even if you don't like what they say, you have to listen to, because they're a SUPERPOWER, damnit!
Now, the classic definition of "Superpower" has always been "somebody really big and important, with lots of money, and guns, and influence." The result is, you listen to a superpower. Now, the protesters want somebody to listen to them. So, they re-define "superpower" to mean "college students looking for something to crusade against, aging hippies, the unemployed and employable, oh, and, uh, France." "See!! Now WE'RE a Superpower, so you have to listen to us! We're the SECOND SUPERPOWER, get it!?! Except, umm, instead of money and guns and nukes and tanks and influence, we have signs, slogans, and a VW with flowers painted it. But you still have to listen!" Oh, well, looks like your re-definition just got re-defined.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
You think that is bad? You must not remember the web around 96 or so. . .
IIIIICK!!!
HUUUGE ass searches. Search Engines has basic introductory lessons to Boolean Logic, almost necessary just so users could find something
It
was not
pretty.
And when the first web based forums started showing up (in all their slow loading CGI glory), search results got completely destroyed almost over night.
(thankfully more and more people began to take notice of robots.txt . . . . )
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
I think the gist of the article is that a not very widely read, techno-elite, blogger network has out "Page Ranked" the original New York Times article that was the origin of the term "Second Superpower".
The register article is pretty long, and mind you it would be pretty funny if it ended up being the number one search result for "Second Superpower"...
Remember how PageRank is supposed to work - it ranks websites in order of "importance". I still not sure if I agree with this as a whole (and prefer the HITS algorithm). It seems hard to imagine that the (in this case anti-war) Blog community is more authoritative than the NY Times.
Not sure that there's any solution to this issue, but I think its more of an observation on the limitations of PageRank.
Winton
If 1 out of 10 US citizens who bitch on slashdot would actually write their elected representatives instead of hitting the "submit" button things might begin to change. Otherwise our legislators will only hear from the lobbyists on most issues.
Happy Fun Ball is for external use only.
Right now there is heavy linkage to the blog. Sure, but what about in the future? When the links get archived and Google stops seeing them? As time progresses the web graph should stablize and the "true" meaning should come to the front.
Of course, I think both effects are great. Why? Well if a term takes on a certain meaning for a local period of time... wouldn't you assume that most searches/links to it are using that definition? And that over time a more stable definition would dominate? I don't see this as a bad thing.
What is music when you despise all sound?
The point of the article isn't about competing "memes", it's about flaws in Google's PageRank system. In this case, the weighting of site importance on the basis of the number and authoritativeness is being thrown by the incestuous linking behavior of weblogs.
If there's a flaw in the article, it's that it implies -- without ever quite coming out and saying it -- that there was some sort of conspiracy or malice aforethought. Obviously, there was not.
Also implied but not stated directly is that Google has some kind of responsibility to make sure that its results aren't skewed by anomalous inputs. Whether they do or not is a matter of opinion, but the article would have been much stronger if the author had addressed the point directly. OTOH, considering how little traction the idea of social responsibility has among the center-right libertarian crowd that reads the Register, I can see why the author declined to wander into that quagmire.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
No, the point of the article is that the PageRank of the "new" definition of "second superpower" shot up because of basically one essay on a popular blog. The blog is linked to by a few other popular sites, and that's all it takes to change the lexicon. A few dozen netarati with popular blogs can make the original hard news article that coined the term to be dropped from the first page of the search results. This is in fact proof that google sometimes doesn't work.
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
You know what? I don't care who the "second superpower" turns out to be. It can be a nation. It can be a people. What gets me is that people seem to think there has to be one.
I'm going to be point blank honest. If someone has to be the dominant superpower, I want it to be the United States.
Why? Well several reasons but the main one is that I'm a United States Citizen. It's in my best interests for the U.S. to be on top. The United Nations doesn't hold my best interests. France sure as fuck doesn't.
Another reason is that I consider the Constitution of the United States to be the single greatest document ever known to man. The United Nation's Human Rights charter tried to be that but it's little caluse about all right's being null and void if they go against the goals of the U.N. really fucked it up. The Constitution puts the power into the hands of free men and not the government.
I love how both the republicans and democrats seem to think that our rights are confered on us by the federal government. What kind of bullshit is that? Did they read the document they swore to uphold? Our rights are endowed to us by our creator. It is the governments job to safeguard those. If they fail, we have the power to put in a government that WILL.
Just as in everything, it's survival of the fittest. If another nation rises to be a superpower then bully for them. I personally think it's stupid for a government to be more concerned about what the U.S. is doing and how they stack up to the U.S. than to be concerned about it's own people.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
Welcome to proof that Google works the way it was intended, in only 42 days!
Yeah, it works like it was intended, but not the way it should. This is similar to stuffing your meta tags to get a higher page rank on search engines. It hacks a publicly known algorithm to get the desired results. Using weblog syndication, one could reduce the page rank of static pages. If you wanted your opinion to be the 'google truth', just artificially create more links to it. With so many dynamic, interlocked websites on the web these days, it becomes much easier. This is proof of concept that you could cover up static content within weeks. If this becomes popular, it could reduce Google's usfullness. OTOH, they'll probably just change their algorithm to take RSS syndication into account.
"Oh yeah, well my daddy can still beat up your daddy."
That's about the level of intelligence and maturity evinced by your post.
I agree with some posters claiming that the Register article isn't the best example...like many, I think the two meanings of "Second Superpower" don't seem that different, and both seem productive.
But to focus on that alone is to completely miss the point of the article! What's much more interesting are the claims it makes about PageRank. It makes the case that bloggers only make up 4% of the web-surfing population, which might be a BIT low but sounds right to me. THEN they point out that because of how PageRank works with its distributed scores, all it takes is for 10-20 "A-List Bloggers" (ie. a very small fraction of an already small 4%) to link to something to catapult it to the very top of a Google search. We all use Google, so we know how important this is.
The point, then? PageRank claims to be democratic, yet the article demonstrates that 20 or so people can effectively dictate the order of search results for certain terms. It's not a conspiracy...yet. Certainly worth noting, however!
Imagine if you typed "freedom of expression" in Google, and instead of articles about protecting speech that governments want to suppress, the first 50 hits were articles about AT&T's wireless service, back when they were using the slogan 'Freedom of Expression'.
The point is an important idea got replaced with a completely banal phrase. And it only took a few bloggers to decide that they liked the banal phrase better than the important idea.
The danger is that the phrase loses all meaning. So you might march under the banner 'Freedom of Expression', and all the passersby will think you are complaining about your cell phone reception.
Separating out the bizarre attacks on Joi Ito for eating lunch, his thesis seems to be that 'A-list bloggers' have hijacked and neutered the phrase from the Anti-war (or anti-Bush) protestors, and swamped Google with this new interpretation.
In fact, the original article he cites (reproduced here) did not contain the phrase 'second superpower'; it had a throwaway rhetorical flourish in the first sentence:
The fracturing of the Western alliance over Iraq and the huge antiwar demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.
(Orlowski elides the first part about the Western alliance to support his these that it's all about the street, man).
As he says, this meme circulated about the web a bit, and eventually James Moore explored the idea in more detail, and a broader context than just marching against Bush, combining it with the preceding discussions on 'emergent democracy' that had been going for a while. Of course this gets a higher rank for 'second superpower' - it is in the title, and enough people found it interesting enough to link to.
Instead of a lot of incoherent slogans, here are people discussing how to bring it about.
Orlowski then completely distorts the quote from Patrick Nielsen Hayden I posted to the list. Discussing a report on the very disruptive, street-blocking protests, where protesters in San Francisco, Boston, Washington and elsewhere shouted the same slogan, "This is what democracy looks like!"
Patrick said
No, that's not what democracy looks like.
It's what protest looks like, and it's often the right thing to do. And of course "democracy" had better entail significant tolerance of unruly protest, or it's not very democratic.
But that slogan is stupid, even by the standards of slogans. Long and often boring meetings are what democracy looks like. Tiresome horse-trading is what democracy looks like. Talking to your neighbors is what democracy looks like.
Democracy can function perfectly well without people painting their faces and blocking streets. It can't function at all without that other stuff.
The emergent democracy group is about how to build tools and structures to capture democratic intent in a digital world. If you're interested in this, join in.
Perhaps what Orlowski is really worried about is that a group who aren't part of the clerisy of professional Journalists and activists are taking an interest, and actually discussing ideas calmly and rationally, and thereby attracting links from other people, Doc and Dave earned their high Google ranking by writing lots of things that people found interesting enough to link to, day after day for over 5 years.
Andrew, if you have interesting things to say about the future of democracy, join the discussion, but don't troll for cheap links by stooping to selective quotation and ad hominem attacks.
"The idea of page-ranking surely is more to do with relevance of a search term than to find information that is hard to find"
Is something more 'relevant' just because a lot of people link to it? I might suggest that this is not always so.
"Popular" and "relevant" are not equivalent terms. If we are discussing social relevance then the meaning changes a bit, but we are talking about relevance with regard to the thing being searching for, and the fact that an item is popular does not automatically make it a better match.
A.
...bringing you cynical quips since 1998
How it could miss a freaking NYT article? Well, it's probably because the New York Times makes it difficult to link to themselves. They take down older articles and charge for "research" forcing most people to trudge off to the library or do without. Most people who don't want to look like loons pointing to non-extant links don't point at the NYT and so the NYT is going to sink very low in Google results. They deserve it.
Just the same, we should all be aware that Google can and does miss the originators of ideas. It's a huge step up over pulp publications which could miss entire social movements or hoplessly prevert them according to the world view of the publisher. Google can shine it's light on fledgling ideas you would never have found 20 years ago, much less in today's consolidated media. Yet for all it's goodness, it has not earned its PhD yet.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Personally, I don't get the problem here. All Google measures, and all ANY computerized searching system can measure, is what *other people* think is important. It can't measure the actual relative import of different ideas - that would be known as a strong AI problem. Now here we are critizing and whining about Google for doing its job too well. If the "other meaning" of "Second Superpower" is so fucking important, why aren't more people talking about it and linking to articles about it?
Odd that the Mr. Orlowski invokes Orwell, as the way Google ranks the pages this phrase appears is as far from a "Big Brother" operation as one can get! Many people, independantly linking to a particular web page? How on earth is that "Orwellian"? He does not even suggest that Google is "cheating", he just tosses the phrase about like so many random hand grenades.Well, if you want to swap words with quite different meanings I guess you can pretend to make any arguement you like. Note that the author does not bother acknowledging that the "handful" of 'bloggers that link to the page and phrase in question are all quite popular themselves, because many other individuals in turn link to them. If anybody is engaged in Doublespeak here it is the author, not the masses that evolve the language. Compairing a lone 'blogger to Communist China is obscene.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
"The United States is NOT a super power because of its "large world wide voice". The United States is a super power because IT IS POWERFUL ENOUGH TO COMPLEATLY DESTORY EVERY MAN WOMAN AND CHILD IN ANY NUMBER OF NATIONS AT ANY POINT IN TIME IT SHOULD SO CHOOSE TO DO SO"
Russia can still do the same, but are not considered a superpower anymore.
Superpower is one of those words so overused that people forget its meaning. A regional power is a country that has a large amount of power and influence in a particular geographic region. Britian, France, and Germany are European powers. China and Japan are East Asian powers.
A Superpower is a country whose influence extends far beyond its region to every part of the globe. During the Cold War, United States and Soviet power was evident in every region. The Soviets had power all the way into the Americas as evidenced by Cuba and the communist uprisings in Central America. The United States had power in places as far off as Europe, Korea, and Turkey.
After the fall of the Cold War the United States is the only country that has that sort of reach. Russia can't extend its power to start uprisings the Western Hemisphere anymore. The United States just a short time ago helped the Northern Alliance take down their enemy the Taliban half a world away in a land notorious for "chewing up" big-shot powers for hundreds of years. That's power. That's a superpower. It is not just being able to blow everyone up. It is also being able to influence people through ideas and arguments. Its about making what you want to happen actually happen.
Not every country strives to be a superpower. Remember this when you hear about China being the next "superpower". China has shown little interest in what happens outside their region. If they had Taiwan they would be pretty much content.
Europe recently failed the superpower test by their inability to stop the genocide in the former Yugoslavia and the necessity of the United States to come in and stop the madness once again. That is just embarrassing. Imagine if France had to come over here and deal with Mexico. You have to be able to deal with your own region before you can see yourself as a "superpower".
Brian Ellenberger
"Popular" and "relevant" are not equivalent terms.
I eagerly await your search engine implementation which directly determines page rank based on relevancy.
Perhaps if you seriously tried you'd discover just how hard it is.
Google's algorithm isn't perfect but it beats the pants off of nearly everything else, and all of its serious competition at this point seems to use basically the same techniques. There's a reason for this, and it's not a lack of brain power in any of the search engine companies.
The referenced Register article, which chronicles the "Googlewashing" of the term "second superpower", is an excellent example of social network theory and its effect on language.
Unfortunately, the Register incorrectly assigns the blame on alluded conspiratorial behavior of webloggers. In fact, the phenomenon is not the result of a conspiracy, but a natural consequence of the dense network that interconnects bloggers.
The critique of the Register article along with an introduction to social network theory is provided here
Michael.
Linux : Mac
I don't think that this particular "Googlewashing" is intentional by Google, I think it's just a result of their algorithm which looks at link popularity, as mentioned in the article; Google are privately-held (no public shareholders) and the management seem to be liberal/libertarian, e.g. they refuse to take advertising from gun and tobacco companies. On the other hand they have allegedly collaborated with at least 1 government to censor themselves, but in the case of China that was probably a case of "either you censor yourselves or we block you completely", so they probably didn't have much of a choice in that case.
So anyway, I think they would be quite into these link-type discriminators and would like to use them if they became widely used. Another reason why XML is the future...
[1] In other words, non-XHTML XML styled with CSS or XSL, if you want to get *really* technical. Using a multiple-output-type delivery system like Apache Cocoon, you can still support older browsers and serve this up to browsers which support it. (Make sure your outgoing proxy, if any, supports the HTTP Vary header though!)
Female Prison Rape in NY