What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [44]
Ding. She was right. I was defending the taste of the American people. That moment evolved my worldview (as the internet would again 20 years later). I realized just then that once the people were given choice and control, they would tend to pick the good stuff. The more choice they had, the better the stuff they picked. The better stuff they picked, the more Hollywood was forced to make good shows for them. Here was a virtuous cultural circle and another law: Abundance breeds quality.
Of course, there have been exceptions—blooper shows, game shows, tabloid shows, trailer-trash talk shows. We have feared that each of these trends would take over television and society. But in each case, we as a nation overdosed on our guilty pleasures and they faded away. Quality wins. I’ve long argued that the golden age of television was not the 1950s, with our misplaced nostalgia for its cheesy video Vaudeville. Uncle Miltie, I say, was a hack. The Sopranos is higher art than Playhouse 90. Seinfeld, Cheers, and The Office are funnier than The Honeymooners. Sacrilege, perhaps, but true. The golden age of TV is now—or probably tomorrow, as TV is reinvented and opened up on the internet.
On that day in the 1980s, I learned to trust the people. Bonnie Arnold’s challenge turned me into a populist. I realized that if you didn’t trust the people, then you couldn’t believe in democracy (why let us pick our leaders…even if we sometimes do bollix it up?), free markets (shouldn’t somebody be in charge?), journalism and education (why inform the people if they’re a bunch of idiots?), even reform religion (surely the masses shouldn’t talk directly with God).
My new, populist worldview was only strengthened by my experience with the internet, which gives us control over not just our consumption of media but now its creation. The internet enables unlimited creation and, because abundance breeds quality, we now have more good stuff. I know, you’re going to rub my nose in a YouTube video—one featuring a flaming fart or a twirling cat—and you’ll argue that the internet opens the door to the creation of crap. That, it does. But it also offers new opportunities for talent and new stages for voices that could not emerge in the old systems of control. There have always been bad books on bookstore shelves next to the gems. See: Danielle Steel. There will always be flaming cat videos next to art online. But there is the opportunity to make more art now. The challenge is finding and supporting it. That is where Google comes in. Google can’t and shouldn’t do it all; we still need curators, editors, teachers—and ad salespeople—to find and nurture the best. But Google provides the infrastructure for a culture of choice.
Google’s algorithms and its business model work because Google trusts us. That was the ding moment that led Sergey Brin and Larry Page to found their company: the realization that by tracking what we click on and link to, we would lead them to the good stuff and they, in turn, could lead others to it. “Good,” of course, is too relative and loaded a term. “Relevant” is a better description for what Google’s PageRank delivers. As the company explains on its site:
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the