Google Me

Barbara Cassin, Michael Syrotinski

Description

"Google is a champion of cultural democracy, but without culture and without democracy." In this witty and polemical critique the philosopher Barbara Cassin takes aim at Google and our culture of big data. Enlisting her formidable knowledge of the rhetorical tradition, Cassin demolishes the Google myth of a "good" tech company and its "democracy of clicks," laying bare the philosophical poverty and political naivete that underwrites its founding slogans: "Organize the world's information," and "Don't be evil." For Cassin, this conjunction of globalizing knowledge and moral imperative is frighteningly similar to the way American demagogues justify their own universalizing mission before the world.While sensitive to the possibilities of technology and to Google's playful appeal, Cassin shows what is lost when a narrow worship of information becomes dogma, such that research comes to mean data mining and other languages become provincial "flavors" folded into an impoverished Globish, or global English.

Sujets

• Philosophy
• Literary theory
• Media studies

Informations

• Publié par: Fordham University Press
• Date de parution: 03 octobre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780823278091
• Langue: English

Extrait

GOOGLE ME

This page intentionally left blank

S E R I E S E D I T O R S Bruce Clarke and Henry Sussman

E D I T O R I A L B O A R D : Victoria N. Alexander, Dactyl Foundation for the Arts and Humanities Erich Hörl, Ruhr University Bochum John H. Johnston, Emory University Hans-Georg Moeller, Philosophy and Religious Studies Program, University of Macau, China John Protevi, Louisiana State University Samuel Weber, Northwestern University

This page intentionally left blank

GOOGLE ME ONE-CLICK DEMOCRACY

BARBARA CASSIN

Translated by MICHAEL SYROTINSKI

Fordham University Press

New York 2018

Copyright © 2018 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

This book was originally published in French as Barbara Cassin,Google-moi: La deuxième mission de l’Amérique, Copyright © Éditions Albin Michel, 2007.

Cet ouvrage, pubîé dans e cadre d’un programme d’aîde à a pubîcatîon, bénéicîe de la participation de la Mission Culturelle et Universitaire Française aux Etats-Unis, service de l’Ambassade de France aux EU.

This work, published as part of a program of aid for publication, received support from the Mission Culturelle et Universitaire Française aux Etats-Unis, a department of the French Embassy in the United States.

Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available online at http://catalog .loc.gov.

Printed in the United States of America

20 19 18

First edition

5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

Translator’s Preface

Preface to the English-Language Edition

Introduction: Why Be Interested in Google?

1. The Internet Revealed through Google

2. Google Inc.: From Search to Global Capital

3. Our Mission Is to Organize the World’s Information

4. Don’t Be Evil

5. On Cultural Democracy

Notes

Index

ix

xv

1

7

22

40

64

91

127

147

This page intentionally left blank

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

The following text is a translation of Barbara Cassin’s critique of Google,Google-moi: La deuxième mission de l’Amérique, irst pub- lished in French by Albin Michel in 2007. There were other more familiar, often journalistic accounts of Google published around the same time, such as John Battelle’sThe Searchand David Vise’sThe Google Story, both of which Cassin references, or more recent vol- umes by media theorists, such as Siva Vaidhyanathan’sThe Googli- zation of Everything (2011), or Steven Levy’sIn the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives(2011), or even Eric Schmidt and Johathan Rosenberg’s own recentHow Google Works. But Cassîn’s book îs the irst to embed a crîtîque of Googe înto a philosophical genealogy. What makes this book such a unique per- spective on the phenomenon of Google and Internet culture more generally is that Cassin brings to bear an extraordinary philosophi- cal rigor and sophistication to her account of the rise of Google and the impact it has had on cultural activities worldwide, most crucially on the forms that knowledge takes. Cassin is a formidable Hellenist by training, although her work overturns much of what we thought we understood about Greek philosophy, unsettling conventional wisdom or subverting critical commonplaces, and celebrating, for example, the Sophists over and against Plato’s philosopher-kings. InGoogle Me, her deep knowledge of Greek culture, philology, and philosophy (and of the history of philosophy and thought more broadly) becomes the lens through which she challenges the

ix