Wanted to refer you to an interesting article by Vivienne Waller in the latest First Monday, “The relationship between public libraries and Google: Too much information”. She gives a good overview of the relationship between Google in general and the Google Books Project specifically, using a “pop psychology” framework of an initial romantic phase on the part of libraries for Google, to a eventual realization that Google and Libraries actually have different wants, goals, and agendas.
The majority of the article is a good recap for those who haven’t been following the debate closely, but I specifically wanted to touch on two parts.
The first is her idea, which I believe is original because she doesn’t cite anyone, of “infogration”:
As well as trying to ensure that information is accessible to all, Google is involved in trying to make sure that people are accessing more and more information via the Web. Google has done this by pioneering a brilliant new model of business expansion, introduced here as infogration. Infogration is radically different from the traditional model of horizontal integration, which involves buying up competition, and vertical integration, which involves buying upstream and downstream industries. Infogration involves capturing different aspects of physical and social reality and representing them with digital information. In other words, infogration involves the integration of aspects of the world in to the medium of information into which targeted ads can then be placed.
Much more insidious than the regular process of horizontal and vertical integration, this infogration actually involves the gobbling up of our personal lives by corporations in the business of information. Our personal info, our thoughts and feelings, even our health records and genetic code. As Waller notes, one day we will see that we have the genetic marker for obesity and be targeted for weight loss ads wherever we search.
While I appreciate the social aspect of the Internet, it seems like you take any organic naissance of a means of social interaction, and sooner or later it gets sold out to the highest bidder just for the aggregate of information built up. YouTube is a prime example, but any of Google’s acquisitions would do.
The second discussion of Waller’s, and one I have begun thinking about a lot lately, is the differing concept of “information” used by Google in their business goal to organize the world’s information, and by Libraries as exemplified by the ALA’s mission statement.
However, how can these two uses of the information support such dissimilar goals: to make information accessible and sell advertising on Google’s part, and to support democracy on the part of public libraries. Waller quotes Roszak’s The Cult of Information: “‘A fact, a judgement, a shallow cliché, a deep teaching, a sublime truth, or a nasty obscenity. All are “information”.’” She briefly discusses the modern use of the word “information”, and then writes in a very important passage the following (my emphasis):
Google is concerned with the free flow of digital information, information that is accessible anywhere anytime. In other words, Google is concerned with the form of the information. In contrast, public libraries aim to provide access to information in order to strengthen democracy. This requires a balanced flow of information and some sort of ordering of significance. In other words, libraries are concerned with the content of information. Google is only concerned with the content inasmuch as it is enables targeted advertising.
This quote explains exactly why I have been so dissatisfied with my colleagues in libraries, and what I believe the problem to be. With the rise of computer systems for accessing data, librarians have given up on their historical mandate of supporting democracy by not only supplying “information”, but by supplying the kind of information that will allow citizens to come to independent judgments and participate in a healthy democracy.
We have given up on trying to offer some balance, quality control, and yes, even ordering of information based on educated judgement, in favour of ever increasing flows of information, technological utopianism, and a willingness to let corporations solve our problems instead of using our own professional judgement.
On my more pessimistic days, I agree with you completely. On better ones, though, I’d say that we still do pay attention to selecting quality information and ordering it in such a way as to make it useful. I still read book reviews and select books to purchase with those reviews in mind. When I’m asked if we should get a new database, I spend a fair amount of time see what’s in it and how it works. And I spend a lot of time trying to help people learn to evaluate the information they find out in the world — because ultimately, they are going to encounter information outside the library, without guidance — and that’s been true since before Google, and will be after it.