The word compression is used to describe a technical process that renders a mode of representation adequate to its infrastructures. Humanists and engineers, still evaluate media in terms of their ability to produce authentic effects. Sterne presented the idea of compression with a historical background. He compared the phenomenon with packing a suitcase. “You have too many clothes to fit in it,” he said, “so you roll them up, you squish them until you run out of space.” This I thought was the best way to describe the phenomena. If compression transforms representation for the purposes of technical media, it also transforms media to render them adequate to representation. This leads to the question why and how efficiency and effectiveness, along with an authenticity to get the reliable experience, is a driving concern in the theory of media. Sterne also sheds light on the importance of understanding how and why lower-definition experiences are sometimes among the most intense, significant and meaningful moments in modern life. As new communication infrastructures come into existence, aesthetic representation becomes an engineering problem. Specifically, where people make representational demands upon infrastructures that exceed the carrying capacity.

Furthermore, to sum up the media structures readings, I would say that it contributes towards the development of digital media. Its emphasis was on how digital media represents a physical, concrete and tangible infrastructure. It was a good read, shedding light on several kinds of technologies and implications of digital media infrastructures- which I would never have stopped to think about twice, including data centers, media infrastructures, cloud, and digital compression processes. Now we can easily see the several consequences of these infrastructures on society, especially in relation with media and environmental sustainability. It makes one think how much of the world of technology and data does not meet the eye.

Vaidhyanathan states;  “If Google is the dominant way we navigate the Internet, and thus the primary lens through which we experience both the local and the global, then it has remarkable power to set agendas and alter perceptions. Its biases are built into algorithms. And those biases affect how we value things, perceive things, and navigate the worlds of culture and ideas (pg.7).” His fundamental idea is that we should work to regulate search systems like Google to take responsibility for how the Web delivers knowledge to us, the general public.

His reflection on the examination of Google Scholar is that the product ranks different articles based on the citations they receive. When searching on Google Scholar we are given results from across all the disciplines. This tool brings the titles of academic research to the public knowledge but the service is said to be flawed. Because, “according to academic librarians, Google Scholar has been constructed with Google’s usual high level of opacity and without serious consideration of the needs and opinions of scholars” (pg.192). While it may be true that many of the search features of ‘academic’ search engines are lacking, Vaidhyanathan misses the importance of design: do present modes of academic search meet his objective of a system that allows for the easy acquisition of knowledge?

Thus, like old times this makes the need for librarians important. We can trust librarians because of their philosophy of protecting users and information. Librarians have always been a trusted source of knowledge filtering and the university libraries still have a stronghold of knowledge accumulation and storage.

Google’s mass digitization of books (i.e. Google Books), and Google’s rising influence in higher education is alarming. Trusting Google with such important material, like all our academic heritage, is going a bit too far.