Whit Andrews

I took great pleasure the last few days in reading Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge, which bears a text badge on the cover that reads “[A View From Europe]“, which is a duh-to-the-max addendum if there has ever been one such. The book is deeply non-American, and was a pleasing wake-up call for me. I am very American, and proud of it, but I do try my best to extend my understanding of my beloved country from other perspectives not my own.

The cover badge is accurate in its brevity. It is not, in fact, Europe’s view, but a view from France. I speak enough French to order a meal in Paris or Montreal, or to bank with a teller at my neighborhood bank who is French by birth, but I don’t read it — at least not well. I read a Marguerite Duras book in high school (in French class), and I remember misreading that the protagonist placed a blossom between her lips, when, in fact, she put it somewhere more provocative (but still safe for family readers, at least in France). Since then, I’ve stuck to English-language books.

Jean-Noel Jenneney’s book is in English, thanks to Teresa Lavender Fagan, who translated it enchantingly. It shares a lot of the characteristics I learned to enjoy in French literature and criticism, including acerbic wit, penetrating irreverence and a willingness not to allow redundancy, self-contradiction or outlandishness to stand in the way of making excellent points. (For example, much of the book is devoted to the idea that diversity and heterogeneity of thought is critical to intellectualism, which is absolutely correct. Jeanneney nevertheless in nearly the same breath can and does crow that Simon Schama’s book on the French Revolution  is so loathsome that it has not been translated into French. Vive la difference, in other words, but pas tous les differences.)

The most important thing about the book, frankly (there’s an accidental French pun for you), is that it exists. There’s a fair amount of wooly-headed, unproductive musing, but there ought to be, because the topic it addresses — the risk of monoculture in the way that the world’s information is stored and found — is a genuinely terrifying prospect that demands a sort of ruminative panic. I wrote in college (this would be after the Duras incident, as I believe it is still known at my alma mater) that the fear I had of the computerization of catalog materials at the college library was that centralization could lead too easily to bowdlerization or even censorship. The Internet appeared to have made that reflection shockingly naive and alarmist, as gophers, worms and wikis reinforced massive redundancy and heterogeneity of information. Google and Wikipedia, of course, reminded me that so many concerns are right — it’s just a question of when. (I have been musing with a friend about when Malthus will be right, and whether Al Gore — and me — will live to see it.) Centralization IS a real risk, and IS really scary.

“[A View from Europe]” might better have been said, “A View Some of You Americans Haven’t Considered.” I am sure many Americans have, of course, considered the views in the book. The fear of information monoculture is, in fact, something that is quite resonant, particularly among our clients who are focused on risk and security issues. One of the pithiest elements in the book is in Ian Wilson’s introduction, where he illuminates the fact that Jeanneney’s book is not prescriptive but explosive; it is a summons to debate, not an admonition from the reference desk to hush and not disturb the library. (This tendency toward constructive collective criticism is something I remember extremely fondly from Jacques Derrida, whom I read in English and French in college as a juxtaposition to Nietszche — whom no one would have wanted to be on the other side of their local circulation desk.)

One of the most important views, I think, is the fact that advertising is not a safe business model for as much as Google applies it to. Jeanneney bridles theatrically at the possibility that an advertisement for madeleines could be served alongside a text of Proust’s Rememberance of Things Past. I, on the other hand, feel like that would be a perfectly appropriate ad — a financially driven annotation that really does add value. (I wonder — does Jeanneney know how few Americans, and possibly also Germans or Chinese or Samoans — have actually had a madeleine? I wonder why I don’t have any to go eat right now, in fact.) On the other hand, a friend of mine told me recently that he was reading an email in which he learned a friend had died; the Gmail advertising engine offered him ads from casket makers and funeral homes.

Other critical contrary views? The idea that a product as powerful as Google should be examined more deeply by government entities, and that there is value in even funding rivals to keep the market dynamic and to avoid homogeneity. (Remember the Depression-era projects that resulted in magical pictures and writings? We are not so far from this. The irony of the fact that I am linking to a digitzation project like those examined in the book does not escape you, I’m sure, even though it very nearly did me.) Also, the fact that Google will not live forever, and when its empire falls, who will own its massive datastores of knowledge? Finally, that everything might happen in what we once called “Internet time,” but that the value of long-term planning is not to be gainsaid or ignored, and that it is in Europe — where, like China and Japan, long-term planning is culturally more acceptable in many ways than it is in the New Worlds — they have a fresh way of seeing businesses like Google.

In its jubilant self-contradiction and witty analysis, Jeanneney’s book misses a few critical facts. It focuses on the idea that a book is a unitary object, a narrative whole, without acknowledging that many users already ignore that fact and skim or use the index to find what they need and move on. Obviously, having been originally written in the deeply distant past (2005), it cannot reflect also on the potential power of Amazon’s Kindle in book analysis. Because it focuses mostly on Google’s projects oriented toward books and scholarship, it lacks scope that would make it more valuable in understanding Google as a whole. Nevertheless, on balance, the slim volume — a pleasure to heft and a reminder of the delightful value of book design! — delightfully illuminates many of the shortcomings in the current debate about the extraordinary Google.

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