19.050 ouroboric Google and the Internet

                Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 19, No. 50.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                   www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

   [1] From: "Charles Baldwin" <Charles.Baldwin_at_mail.wvu.edu> (18)
         Subject: GWEI (Google Will Eat Itself) from Net Art News

   [2] From: Michael Hart <hart_at_pglaf.org> (57)
         Subject: Re: 19.046 hegemonic Google and the state of the
                 Internet

--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Tue, 24 May 2005 06:27:54 +0100
         From: "Charles Baldwin" <Charles.Baldwin_at_mail.wvu.edu>
         Subject: GWEI (Google Will Eat Itself) from Net Art News

More on hegemonic Google, this from the Net Art News list (Net Art News
<netartnews_at_rhizome.org>):

Google's Last Bite

Will Google morph into the next Yahoo?! With the advent of Gmail,
Google Groups, Google Maps, My Google and talks of Finance, Weather,
Personals and Classifieds, the once bare-bones search engine is setting
its sights on information hegemony. Noticing and countering this
monopolistic eventuality is an artist group in Italy with their
web-based project, GWEI (Google Will Eat Itself). The project exists as
a typical E-commerce website that hosts Google Ad-Sense advertisements.
With every page visit the site receives, it generates revenues from
Google through the ads. Since Google is a publicly traded company, the
money generated from the ads on the site are then used to buy Google
shares. The end goal of the project? To turn enough profit from the ads
to buy shares and eventually own the web's most popular search engine.
So start clicking and we'll see if the plan will work! - Jonah
Brucker-Cohen

http://www.gwei.org

--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Tue, 24 May 2005 06:33:29 +0100
         From: Michael Hart <hart_at_pglaf.org>
         Subject: Re: 19.046 hegemonic Google and the state of the Internet

We have just heard a few more raindrops falling into our conversation
from the storm of protests that inevitably fall into the "not invented here"
category that is used so often to pooh-pooh new alternatives.

Let's face it, the Internet is still a new alternative, most people using
the Internet haven't been using it for even a decade. . .think of what
cars, planes, telephones, televisions, calcuators and computers were like
after most people had only used them for a decade. . . .

However you may cut it, those who started early, either in chronological
time, or early in their lives, still have a jump on those who didn't,
and no matter how much ye olde boye networkes complaine about how the
Internet still isn't worth anything when it comes down to it. . .the new
boys and girls on the block are still heading out there at warp speed,
even if many don't agree if they are going in the right direction.

You aren't going to get them going in the "right direction" simply by
ignoring the Internet, or telling them to, unless you want to join
the Amish and other orthodoxies around the world. . .I wonder what
will happen when the Pope starts sending email?

All the complaints we are hearing about the Internet have been made
about every new medium ever invented, from those who pooh-poohed
when people moved from stone tablets to clay tablets to papyrus
pages to scrolls, to cut and bound pages, to Gutenberg's Press,
to steam and electric presses, to xerox machines to the Net.

"Don't trust anything printed on clay tablets, papyrus, scrolls,
bound pages, printed by Gutenberg's infernal machines, xerox machines
or the Internet!"

"You can only trust the tried and true of the past,
not the wildly uncontrolled stuff of the future."

Just today I received word that one of our more famous Illinois
libraries is going to require fingerprint identification to log in
to the Internet from the library to cut down on unrestrained access.
I'm sure Kansas will be close behind.

Thanks!!!

So Nice To Hear From You!

Michael

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Received on Tue May 24 2005 - 02:08:50 EDT