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.

Comments

Am I the only one...

[donutello]

... who does not see a huge difference between the two definitions of the phrase "Second Superpower"?

Re:Am I the only one...

[ralphclark]

In caricature, then, to clarify the distinction:

First definition: large crowds of booted skinheads and homeless "alternative lifestyle" (eg alcholic and heavy drug abusing) ex-punks with spiderweb tattoos, on the rampage, smashing in storefront windows, defacing public monuments and lobbing half-bricks at the riot police.

Second definition: you and me with our short attention spans, surfing on slashdot, getting extra annoyed for a few minutes about the latest outragous piece of IP legislation and maybe thinking about possibly sending an angry email to, well, whatever email address somebody was kind enough to post. Well, hell, at least we'll actively gripe about it to our friends at the water cooler in the office the next day.

The Second Superpower has no teeth. As witness the way support for the anti-war movement just melted away in the last days leading up to the war - right about the time it became really clear that Bush didn't give a flying fuck about public opinion. The vast majority of people just gave up. I don't wish to be hypocritical; I count myself among them.

It's just the way people are. Trouble is, we all know that you can only take a protest so far before it becomes outright revolution, and then things get broken and you might get in trouble with the law or get hurt. As long as people have comfortable lives to return to they will have no truck with revolution. You need to have nothing to lose before you will risk everything.

That's why every government likes to create and maintain a large and comfortable middle class even if there are some people without a job or a roof over their heads. The apathy of the former acts as an effective buffer against the anger of the latter ever gaining enough support to make a significant impact.

How DARE they use Free Speech against liberals???

[Nova Express]

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...

top hits on google == language definition?

[Vellmont]

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.

Re:I love the google* words.

[Alrescha]

"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.

Orwell

[meta-monkey]

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.

Re:I love the google* words.

[Com2Kid]

• 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.

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 . . . . )

Re:this is /.

[ces]

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.

PageRank != Democratic, is the point!

[flaneur]

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!

Re:Google works..

[PickaBooga]

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.

That's not the point.

[Erris]

The difference was subtle, but the point was how Google got bombed with the second meaning. The Register noticed that the "NPR" version filled up all but three of the first 30 Google search results for "Second Superpower". It's not a big deal as long as you know that Google is not always the best source of information.

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.

Re:I love the google* words.

[GMontag]

After reading the article, it seems the Andrew Orlowski's core complaint is that Greenpeace, and the other special interest groups that he names, do not control the language. At least this particular phrase that Patrick Tyler of the NYT allegedly coined.

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.

Googlewash Writing about Google's collusion with the People's Republic of China to block access to mainland users, censorship researcher Seth Finkelsetein observed:

"Contrary to earlier utopian theories of the Internet, it takes very little effort for governments to cause certain information simply to vanish for a huge number of people."

Rub out the word 'government', and replace it with 'weblog A-list'. In this case a commons resource, this very potent and quite viral phrase, was created by millions of people. But it was poisoned by a very select number of 'bloggers'. Possibly a dozen, but no more than 30, we'd guess.

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.

Re:Not quite......

[Galvatron]

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.

Once upon a time, the USA didn't care what happened outside of the western hemisphere (the "Monroe Doctrine"). We had to be dragged kicking and screaming into both of the World Wars. Now the USA is a superpower. I have little doubt that China would be similarly unable to resist the meddling impulse if they became as powerful as the USA.