[iDC] Are We Google's Paint?
Anna Munster
A.Munster at unsw.edu.au
Wed Jan 21 05:09:51 UTC 2009
Thanks for the post Michael and also to Frank's original musings.
I have to say I agree with Michael's comments but I also think we need
to delve deeper into Lessig's analogy and deeper into our analysis of
Google.
First the paint-Leonardo/content-Google analogy. Not only is it
dangerous but it's just plain stupid, I'm afraid and I have to say
shows a completely inadequate understanding of the history of media
and mediation. Paint is NOT content but rather a medium...although, of
course, the relation between media and content is by no means
separable (in spite of Greenberg and the history of American modernist
theory in the second part of the 20thC).
However, paint is also not a medium but a material and one which da
Vinci himself influenced. In fact, we could say that his
experimentation with techniques for boiling oil and combining with
bees wax enabled him to set lighter coloured pigments and therefore
helped develop a tonal range for his paintings that were part of his
'creativity' (god I hate that word!!). Certainly his experiments with
oil paint influenced the development and application of painting. So,
da Vinci did not just go and get his 'content' from elsewhere he was a
material experimenter. I have to say I really hate ill-informed
metaphors drawn from the history of art.
To extend this to more contemporary times, we could also say that
experimentation with data and its imbrication in interfaces,
applications and architecture within the Web 2.0 environment does in
fact mean that content producers are consistently driving the real
development of something like the Google architecture/machine.
Collective shapings of Google Maps' APIs for example have certainly
seen mapping, Google and its potentialities shift in weird and
wonderful ways quite unforseen by Google itself.
The problem is, and I think this is also what Michael is proposing,
the economic, cultural and political value of the force of such
collective content production upon networked architecture is neither
valued nor measured by Google (although it is certainly stored and
accumulated for future ventures). Google's epistemo-political sleight
of hand is to help remap the knowledge economy as a division of labour
between 'architecture' vs. content, with architecture the province of
the post-fordist corporation and content 'free' for everyone else to
produce. It is this 'dispositif' that requires rigorous criticism.
Unfortunately I still find really hard hitting critiques of Google
itself hard to come by. I'm aware of all the more general post Fordist
work and of course critiques of Google with respect to its data
collection arm and privacy issues. But no one in the English speaking
world has really undertaken a very thorough analysis of Google's many
arms and aspects ( I know Michael Zimmer has a book out and Siva
Vaidhyanathan is working on the Googlization of Everything). But I am
still not convinced that this work does much more than go beyond the
now overstated issues of privacy, ubiquity etc. I'll be interested to
see Siva's book when it comes out as it promises to be more
comprehensive.
But what about a post-network media studies analysis of Google?? I'm
not seeing much around...
This tends to apply to the art world's relation to Google as well with
one of the only really hard hitting pieces on Google being 'Google
will Eat itself' (http://gwei.org/index.php). The irony of course is
that Google does eat itself and then it just turns its own shit into
search results!!
I also wrote a piece for the new CTheory reader in Critical Digital
Studies on Google Earth called: 'Welcome to Google Earth'. A pdf is
available at:
http://staff.cofa.unsw.edu.au/~annamunster/people/
But is anyone aware of other theoretically rigorous analysis?
cheers
Anna
On 20/01/2009, at 8:00 PM, Michael Bauwens wrote:
> Thanks Frank,
>
> I think Lessig's metaphor is dangerous, because it implies that the
> Google docs, written by all of us, since most of the invisible (i.e.
> officially produced) web is not accessible via Google, are in fact
> just as worthless as paint ... This is not the case, but Google and
> other platforms do add a network effect to their original value.
>
> So, certainly, all of us who produce documents for google, photo's
> for flickr, and videos for youtube are creating direct use value of
> our own, but Google creates on top of that, value out of aggegration
> and by building a platform which both enables it, extracts added
> layers of intelligence from it, and funds it plus makes a profit out
> of selling scarcity-driven extra value to the marketplace of
> 'attention'.
>
> What is significant, is that people do create their own use value
> directly, without passing through the marketplace, but that new
> players find ways to monetize it, so we have a reconfiguration of
> 'workers' into peer producers, and capital owners into 'netarchical
> capitalists', who only marginally rely on intellectual property (but
> they do protect some data and added layers to keep them scarce,
> though they do this through secrecy and non-access rather than
> through IP) in their strategies.
>
> This creates new fields of tension, which I have attempted to
> describe here:
>
> The social web and its social contracts. Re-public, . Retrieved from http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=261
>
> From: Frank Pasquale <frank.pasquale at gmail.com>
> To: iDC at mailman.thing.net
> Sent: Monday, January 19, 2009 11:44:10 AM
> Subject: [iDC] Are We Google's Paint?
>
> Hi list,
>
> Over the past few days I've been dipping into Cory Doctorow's
> Content, David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous, and Larry
> Lessig's Remix. I like them all for different reasons; Doctorow is
> an irrepressible enthusiast for online openness, Weinberger connects
> that openness to older patterns of information storage and
> retrieval, and Lessig sings of the creativity it can unleash.
>
> Anyone thinking deeply about the new relationships between art and
> commerce created by the internet should consult Lessig's book; it's
> beautifully written and animated by a strong moral vision of what
> the net can be. However, this quote from Lessig provoked me:
>
> "Some draw a downright foolish conclusion from the fact that
> Google's value gets built upon other people's content. Andrew Keen,
> for example . . . writes 'Google is a parasite: it creates no
> content of its own.' But in the same sense you could say that all of
> the value in the Mona Lisa comes from the paint, that Leonardo da
> Vinci was just a 'parasite' upon the hard work of the paint makers.
> That statement is true in the sense that but for the paint, there
> would be no Mona Lisa. But it is false if it suggests that da Vinci
> wasn't responsible for the great value the Mona Lisa is. . . "
> "The complete range of Google products is vast. But . . .
> practically everything Google offers helps Google build an
> extraordinary database of knowledge about what people want, and how
> those wants relate to the web. Every click you make in the Google
> universe adds to that database. With each click, Google gets
> smarter." (127-128)
> The picture/paint metaphor is a provocative one. Is Lessig vividly
> illustrating the new economy mantra that information is rapidly
> being commoditized? I've always thought of Google as an aid to
> helping me find things--a utility that mixes elements of a telecom
> carrier and a card catalog index. Does Google's supervenient value
> of organizing the web by query really make it as much more
> meaningful, more expressive, than the content it indexes, as the
> Mona Lisa is more meaningful than paint? I know few people searching
> for search results, so I'll conclude that's not a good interpretation.
>
> Another way of glossing the metaphor is to deem Google the "Lord of
> the Memes," because, as David Brooks wryly observes, "prestige has
> shifted from the producer of art to the aggregator and the
> appraiser." I like this interpretation because it complements
> Lessig's characterization of Google as "getting smarter" with every
> click.
>
> Indeed it is--but it's also getting more powerful, more capable of
> framing your window on the world. We may celebrate a world where we
> can all personalize our search results, and where each of us has a
> chance to fight for salience in Google results on a topic (rather
> than pray for a New York Times editor to pull our editorial out of
> the slushpile). But do we really understand how that salience is
> determined? Is there any objective answer to how it should be done?
> And as in so much of our weightless economy online, isn't the
> perception of relevance really the reality?
>
> To his credit, Lessig has been more frank than most fans of Silicon
> Valley about the dangers this power poses (as this Jeffrey Rosen
> article notes):
>
> "During the heyday of Microsoft, people feared that the owners of
> the operating systems could leverage their monopolies to protect
> their own products against competitors," says the Internet scholar
> Lawrence Lessig of Stanford Law School. "That dynamic is tiny
> compared to what people fear about Google. They have enormous
> control over a platform of all the world's data, and everything they
> do is designed to improve their control of the underlying data. If
> your whole game is to increase market share, it's hard to do good,
> and to gather data in ways that don't raise privacy concerns or that
> might help repressive governments to block controversial content."
> So perhaps we are left with the idea that Google does some good
> things, and some bad things--and that Lessig's new cause of anti-
> corruption activism is designed to produce a government capable of
> promoting the former and curbing the latter.
>
> Anyway, I'm just wondering what types more creative than myself
> think of this implicit ordering of creative work and the technology
> that makes it accessible.
>
> --Frank
>
> Frank Pasquale
> Visiting Professor of Law, Yale Law School
>
>
>
>
> PS: I have links and a bit more analysis of the issue here:
> http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2009/01/the_picture_and.html#more
>
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A/Prof. Anna Munster
Deputy Director Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics
School of Art History and Art Education
College of Fine Arts
UNSW
P.O. Box 259
Paddington
NSW 2021
612 9385 0741 (tel)
612 9385 0615(fax)
a.munster at unsw.edu.au
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