Skip to main content

Google came, Google saw, Google conquered

I remember using Google for the first time in second grade.  It was during one of our keyboarding classes, which first taught me how to experience anxiety, where the entire class would get walked down to the computer lab and practice using an assigned computer for an hour or so.  The day we learned about Google we were tasked with exploring what we could find with the keyword "skunk" in various search engines.  That initial search might not have provided much information to the corporation about what my six-year-old self wanted and who I was as a consumer, but I can believe that since then, all that I have learned from and input into the system has been monitored and used to target me as a consumer.

Google is valuable because digital products cost less to produce and maintain than physical products, and this is a product that virtually everyone depends on to find answers.  Google only knows that which is added to its vast digital archive.  You only know what Google is programmed to tell you.

Is data utilized solely to propel the ambitions of capitalism? And if so, can capitalism exist as a benefit for the people it manipulates and exploits?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

a poem to my love,

Scroll in, toward the dot that is not like the rest, until you must move to the next downward.

Bot or Not?

Something I'm learning to enjoy through my interactions with computers is that what exists in digital space came out of some weird place in someone's brain, somewhere, so that it can stimulate some weird place in the brain of the user, here.  Digital text is such an odd platform because many brains have been trained to convert characters into ideas and information, but somehow the computer distorts the distance between a reader and the idea into an archive even more foreign than physical literature.  My experience activating "bot or not" online widened the gap between where I was, what I understood, and the computer I was using.  The website made me feel bamboozled - tricked into believing that what I read was generated by a bot simply because I was told that it was a bot, and even more so uncertain if the activity was meant to kindle intrigue or frustration.  A bot only knows that which it is told to consume.