In The Googlization of Everything, the author raises an intriguing issue: the googlization of memory. In this chapter, the author discusses a very important issue that is difficult to notice – the importance of forgetting things. There are several examples about how forgetting plays a more significant role than remembering to human beings in spite of the efforts they have spared to remember things all through history. They all demonstrate that in an age of information explosion, where “the scarcity has become plentiful”, it is more important to learn how to filter out what might become a burden to our thinking and our mind and forget about it, because or we will get lost in the ocean of details and feel overwhelmed and anxious. As a long time sufferer of anxiety issues, I have tremendous experience in not being able to forget things – things that hurt me in the past and left trauma in my sensitive memory. It is the inability to forget the past that impinged my ability to focus on the present. I kept seeing triggers of my traumatic experience and they were constantly exaggerated by my memories and my mind. Finally, unable to cope with such disorders, I turned to therapists and psychiatrists for help. Through medicine and training, I made tremendous improvement in focusing on what’s important in life.

Even worse, we will lose the ability to take in anything new into our minds if we do not know how to properly forget. The author gives the example of his grandfather who does not have any mental space for new things because the memory of the past has been rooted too deep in his mind. Therefore it is more than necessary to train, or “discipline” our minds to choose and select what is useful for us and filter out what is not. In addition, it is important to forget because unforgotten information has the propensity to be “misused and abused”. Seemingly minor details can “come back and haunt us” in ways we would never expect.

Indeed, it is of great importance to forget than to remember in such an information age where an abundance of information is accessible to us through tools such as google. But the key questions here is: what should we remember and what should we forget? Who can decide it and how it can be decided? According to the author, in an age of googlization, Google does it for us. As the author says, it opens up an abundance of information to us and filters out even more. What we need to learn is how to keep our judgement and work with Google to make the optimal choice. The author says although google makes it easy to both forget and remember things, he is the one who “choose(s) what elements to remember and comfortably ignore the rest”. “What matters is how we choose what to consider in our daily judgements and choices”.

However, the author also mentions that it should be cautioned that google is doing this for us-the right to decide what to take into our mind and what to filter out transfers from our parents and other adults to google. However, do we really know how google does this? What is filtered out for us by the algorithms and what, in the information that is filtered out, is valuable to us? Should we just easily transfer this right to google? In other words, is google reliable and capable of assuming the role that used to be played by the parents and perhaps should be played by ourselves? In education, how do we teach students what to remember and what to forget? Although teacher are usually taught in teacher training classes that they need to ask students to critically filter and interpret the information. It’s hardly clear what those required skills are and how to teach them. The author says in “It feels somewhat liberating that I don’t have to remember to remember very much”. All through my education in China, it is filled with memorization of everything. It is hard to transition into this new mode of learning and teaching mode in the Information Age, where an abundance of information makes me feel nervous and intimidated when I read. I don’t know how to select or filter when faced with tons of readings because I have developed the habit of reading everything very carefully for meaning behind the text. To adapt to the new trend requires special and step-by-step training.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/09/26/651849441/cornell-food-researchers-downfall-raises-larger-questions-for-science

I thought it was relevant because it discusses the use and misuse of big data, but from a different direction than what we have been discussing. Unlike FB and Google, which are businesses and are gathering/manipulating data for capitalist purposes, this one is academic.

Basically, the researcher involved kept analyzing data sets until he came up with something, which can be a good thing — we should look at data from many different directions, but he seems to have been involved in p-hacking, which is the manipulation of data to make certain points stand out and look more significant than they are.

(I think. I’ve never heard of this before, and I’m totally going on the article. Stats isn’t really my field. I could be very wrong here.)

The npr article linked to this article, which deals with p-hacking and its effects. I haven’t read it, but will try to for next week.

I found the Googlification of Everything to be an interesting read. Starting with the “Book of Google” we’re introduced to the idea of blind faith in Google. Not going to lie after this reading I still have faith, but I can a bit more clearly now the rain is gone. Similar to the introduction of cars and planes to society, tech companies like Google are innovative, good at what they do, and set their own rules . It’s only when things go wrong that regulations are put in place. These companies are left alone to innovate and in many cases dominate. I thought of Amazon as a parallel to Google for shopping. They’re slogan is “Everything from A to Z” and their stock is pretty robust. Sure there are other online retailers, but none of them can get me groceries, the newest N.K. Jemisin book, and a drum pedal in one day like Amazon can. Similar to Google whenever I need a product my first thought to check Amazon even though there are many other places to get the item. We’ve seen with big tech companies to grow and monopolize in their respective areas with little to no push back. Which begs the question what is the cost of neglecting to regulate the size and scale of these companies, what they are actually doing with user information and how they are affecting society at large.

I also became a bit more aware of my habits. For example after Googling something I often say “Well according to the Internet blah blah blah” which isn’t bad, but I hadn’t considered that the only search engine I use is Google. Maybe Bing might have said something else. Who knows? I had not really thought much about it until reading this. In many ways Google has become synonymous with the web. The services they offer encompass all the reasons why you go on a computer: checking emails, answering  questions, watching videos, settling scores, mapping directions, and so forth and so on. It’s the perfect business model because you get users to stay on your site for extended periods of time while tracking their movements.

Lastly, one concept that stuck with me from the reading  was this idea of “public failure”. The author describes public failure as a troubling phenomenon that occurs, “when Google does something adequately and relatively cheaply in the service of the public, and public institutions are relieved of pressure to perform their tasks well.”(pg6). I think this stuck out to me in part because I work at a non-profit and often speak with my colleagues about the ways that nonprofits take on issues that’s really the job of the government (education, job training, arts programs in schools etc). It’s way easier for the government to hand out funds and let nonprofits do the work than to fix certain issues themselves. The services these private organizations provide their communities ease pressure on public institutions.  So in that way I guess I had considered public failure before, just not in the context Vaidhyanathan mentions. 

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.

Fifty million accounts FB accounts were attacked.

I didn’t receive a notification about this (so I wasn’t targeted? I guess?), but I know people who did get that notification.

I thought Siva Vaidhyanathan’s The Googlization of Everything was interesting. The discussion on the Googlization of educators and students especially resonated with me, because I’ve seen up close what the author discusses.

The author points out that Google is perhaps the dominant way in which we interact with the internet, and, as a result, wields considerable power. Its biases (found in its algorithms) become our biases. These biases affect us: when we do research via Google (and let’s not lie, we all do), how often do we look past the first page? It doesn’t matter if the information is accurate; it’s on the first page.

When I first started teaching at LaGuardia, I did an exercise which involved students googling Rev. Martin Luther King, jr.  At the time, the third or fourth link was to a MLK webpage that looks official but is completely wrong and racist. It was put up by Stormfront, a white nationalist hate group. I did this to show that you can’t totally trust Google’s results. (As for the website, it has since been taken down.)

I’m not blaming my students. I frequently do the same thing, and, in fact, have probably believed wrong information. It’s common. I was trying to show students what to look for on a website so that they could judge the accuracy of the information.

Google dominates research for our students. I mentioned on the first day of class that I run something call the States Project, wherein my students have to produce a three minute long video about one of the fifty states.

When we start the project, I tell them that they can find most of the information they need on their state’s official website, the state’s tourism board website(s), local news sources, and, for demographics, census.gov.

Students usually don’t use these sites. (Maybe I should require them.) I have had to ban certain websites, mostly because they’re either encyclopedias or aimed at kids. Typically, students type the question into google and just go wherever it takes them. Further, if they don’t find the information on THAT website’s first page, they complain that “they can’t find the answer to the question.”

But, as I said above, I don’t know that I can really fault them that much. When I start researching a subject, I go to Google first. Of course, especially if it’s research for work, I do switch over to other databases, but I start with Google, and when I know nothing about the topic, I start at Wikipedia.

As the author said, the whole issue is information literacy: our students don’t really have info literacy skills. We have to teach them. I think we have to integrate Google into these efforts, because students are going to use it anyway. So, let’s give them the skills to analyze what they find and show them other databases to give them more option AND more access to scholarly work.

Hi guys,

I’m just being a little bit off-topic regarding our readings but I promise I am still talking about data. Tomorrow I am going to a conference that has many promising presentations. It is called “Speed” and it will be at Cornell Tech.

It is free, though you have to submit a registration.

See you there in case you decide it is interesting for you as well!

This is the article I referred to in class about the woman whose photo was taken without her knowledge and then that photo went viral.