Subject/Object

I’ve been having this horrible feeling lately.  I’ve been reading a bit from Google Books on the screen, but just as I get into the Introduction of a book I am hit by this.

And by the time I write down the title of The Idea of Europe: from antiquity to the European Union, I’ve already lost interest. I am not going to spend time trugging my ass to the library every day and read from the various 20 page parts which are relevant to me.   Maybe I could have just read the Introduction and the relevant chapters, took notes, and had been productive from sitting in front of a computer.

But who can read it there are pages missing? It is not that I want to necessarily read every page, but I don’t have a choice in what I can’t read. The Algorithm does. And though the Algorithm can make compromises here and there it is not perfect because it is not me. Depending on the strength of the application of the rules you can see more–sometimes even an entire work. But sometimes you only get

The question then becomes, how much would you pay to read the entire book.  I don’t think I am necessarily ready to pay a large amount for access to a database for music, but I would pay quite a large sum to have Google Books serve me every book I would want to read.  It is fast, it displays the books well.  And yes it messes up metadata for old books. It is not actually the new God, despite some popular opinion.  But going to a true research library is a horror.  For someone who actually cares about looking at to old editions of Charles Dickens, the 1871 and the 1873 editions, the academic research library is much more like the library in Eco’s nightmares.  As a member of the public, not a student, I pay a 60 dollar alumni fee to use the print collection.  If I am just a regular person I think I would pay $120.

And these are not even delivered to my house.  And yes, us priests of the book know that schlepping your ass to the library stacks builds character.  But I’d think that actually using the books more effectively and productively builds a more useful kind of character, no?

I don’t think that there really is a danger in the intellectual tenor of the Internet.  Reading on the Internet will be different, not better or worse, and it is our job to study and interpret the differences.  But I wouldn’t  say that people are fleeing away from books towards the Internet.  Those who can successfully navigate it see its other benefits and we can’t wait for books to catch up with us.  People want to have access to books in the Internet culture.  Students enjoy the convenience of having books they mostly likely are not reading anyway, and those who are more senior citizens of the Internet often express that we wish to  have an opportunity to read more books online and through our devices.

The fact is that the companies who control what culture has become, a commodity industry, have an interest in this relationship of manufacturing physical objects.  But I am ready to offer quite a large sum to have everything on a subscription basis.  And I promise I will continue to buy books.  The best books you need to have by hand to read multiple times, to write in the margins.  To take to the mountains and to the bathroom. But we have to own up to the fact that, like every other form of human production, most books are really bad.  Or to be more generous, most books have little relevance to what I am thinking about right now.  Maybe a chapter, maybe an essay out of a larger collection.  Maybe chapters 3 and 5 and section 2 of chapter 8.

People already have the option of paying $120 for limited access to a library. And yes, the access is limited by its physicality because you can only carry and deal with so many physical books at time.  And they don’t even deliver for that price.  I would be willing to pay more, more than $200 for sure, and I’d have to think about what the maximum I’d pay would be.  If the Government in the person of its Libraries cannot get this done, why should I not be ready to pay Google Books?

I agree, Google is making its money off of the backs of millions of dollars on public investment.  So it is unfortunate that Google is going to do what everyone wants them to do: give us a repository of books.  All books, because we already have all music, all video.  Those who are in love with information in a long form (like there are music aficionados) will pay money to have books delivered to us wherever and whenever, and in ways that we find relevant to our own work.

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.