What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [125]
Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s defense against Carr: “I observe that we’re smarter than ever.” Carr might accuse me of triumphalist reflex—it wouldn’t be the first time—but I say that deep interaction, too, can yield deeper thinking. Because I write in short blog bursts instead of long essays, it might appear that my thoughts are quicker and shallower—you’re free to conclude that. But my ideas may span many posts and take form and shape over weeks and even months, with input, challenge, and argument from many of my blog readers and commenters. Under that pressure, I also drop ideas that don’t work. For me, the blog is a new and efficient means of both collaboration and peer review. It molded a great many of the ideas in this book. So though I do fret about the unread books on my shelves and the virgin New Yorker magazines on my desk—as well as a constant stock of unread tabs in my browser—I also know that I learn volumes online every day. Is what I do now better or worse? I’m not sure that judgment is meaningful. I learn differently, discuss differently, see differently, think differently. Thinking differently is the key product and skill of the Google age.
It has been said that young people today may take on new behavioral norms and mores and political outlooks from games and social software—and I don’t mean sex and violence, but subtler worldviews. “Social software is political science in executable form,” NYU professor Clay Shirky said in one essay. “Social norms in game worlds have the effect of governance,” he said in another. Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig famously declared that code is law: “This code, or architecture, sets the terms on which life in cyberspace is experienced. It determines how easy it is to protect privacy, or how easy it is to censor speech. It determines whether access to information is general or whether information is zoned. It affects who sees what, or what is monitored.” He said code “implements values, or not. It enables freedoms, or disables them.”
So what ethics, values, mores, and models are implicit in Google and our use of it, and how might they affect Generation G? Once more the caveat: It’s difficult to know. But we can speculate. I talked earlier in the book about the ethics I learned from blogs and bloggers: the ethics of the link, of transparency, and of the correction. What else flows from Google?
I believe the aesthetic of simplicity we see online becomes an ethic of simplicity. Elegant code is spare and efficient. That norm of geek culture carried over to Google’s home page and design, where powerful tasks look unassuming and easy—simplicity is complexity well done. Simplicity may carry over from web sites to products to culture and to our view of life.
Google rewards—and more and more, we expect—openness. In our lives, openness takes the form of personal transparency—the bloggers’ code that calls for revealing one’s conflicts and prejudices. In business, companies built on proprietary secrets may not be trusted. The public will now expect them to operate in the open.
I think we will see growing respect for the small and odd. The mass norm of keeping up with the Joneses now yields to prideful individuality because Google rewards uniqueness in the mass of niches—and because odd geeks are coming to rule the culture.
But I fear ours could become a culture of complaint—and I would bear some personal responsibility for that, given my Dell battle. Online, complaint pays off, and after so many years of being subjugated to corporate control, it feels mighty good for us little guys to win. But online, any complaint also threatens to become a war. We, the people, have to learn that we have more power than we know, and we must learn to use it judiciously.
Out of all the