EARLIER this week, upon looking at my Google search history, I became concerned to see "Clean gum off shoe" and "Chipotle Marinade Chicken How To" having been queried within an eight minute time period. I asked myself whether I rely too heavily on Google, but after a short burst of thought, grew restless and Googled for an answer.
As it turns out, there was a panel on Grounds last March titled "Google, the New Media: the Present and Future," in which Media Studies Prof. Siva Vaidhyanathan, the author of "The Googlization of Everything: And Why We Should Worry," spoke about the social and psychological effects of Google on society.
I do not doubt that most students rely on, or even have an obsession with Google, but what I find interesting is that there is such an issue with this. While it is true that Google is a for-profit company traded by self-interested investors every day, have features such as Google Street View really negatively affected your privacy or well-being?
Some points in Vaidhyanathan's book show how skeptical people can be of a single private company being their main portal to the web. I do not condemn anybody for asking questions or even pushing companies to adopt more stringent privacy policies, but the amount of attention given to this issue may be excessive.
After all, Googling your existence on this earth is nothing more than creating a sequence of bytes to which advertisements can be served. If Google were to abuse users' privacy through "essential services" such as email, calendar or search results, its main stream of revenue would diminish rapidly as users flocked to alternative websites with similar functionality.
Critics claim that the danger of Google lies in the sheer number of services it hosts. YouTube, Android OS, News Aggregation, the Chrome web browser, language translators and even my University email, calendar and documents are all hosted by Google. If Google were to disappear for a day, my studies would essentially be frozen, my communications halted and organizational systems derailed.
What many fear is that Google's grip on our day-to-day digital services gives it the power to wreak such havoc. An important fact missing from this argument is that Google enables users to move away from its services. Your email archives can be easily downloaded, your documents exported and your calendar transferred. Since competition might just be "one click away," Google knows it is constricted by users' high standards and the other competitors offering similar free services.
Moreover, critical services and necessities such as transportation, power, water, meals, shelter, knowledge and advising are all offered to students by one organization too - the University. Is it simply because we pay so much money in tuition that we inherently trust all of these eggs to be safe in the University's basket, whereas we are skeptical of Google because its services are free?
It is also worth pointing out that an obsession with or even reliance on Googling is healthy. I would argue that today's compulsive Googler is the successor to yesterday's "bookworm." The power of having so much information from which to choose requires such a discerning eye that it makes the researcher more keen and nimble.
The most staggering aspect of Google is that there is no limit or censor to what a student can find through the use of its services, and perhaps this is the one facet of the company I cannot defend. Inaccurate and malicious information are just as prevalent as fruitful search results. A student searching for drug recipes, information about building a bomb or committing suicide would be presented the relevant information without guidance from an elder or peer. The notion that unfiltered access to this information could cause an unstable child to act irrationally is another argument, yet I would conjecture that anyone committed enough to act maliciously would not hesitate to find other means for digging up results even in the absence of Google.
If you are concerned that you lean on Google too much, but your friends or family do not see it as a problem, you should not worry. Revel in the useful tidbits of information Google aggregates for you, and capitalize on the organization gained from the integration of its free services! Until you see a better alternative spring up, keep local backups of your personal data and "Google on."
Andrew Kouri's column appears Friday in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached ata.kouri@cavalierdaily.com.
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