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.
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/
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 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.