[iDC] Are We Google's Paint?
Andreas Schiffler
aschiffler at ferzkopp.net
Thu Jan 22 03:50:19 UTC 2009
"Google's many arms"? I am not so sure. Google really stands only on one
leg: advertising!
Check out this table: http://investor.google.com/fin_data.html
Q2 2008: Total Revenue 5.367B - Revenue from Advertising 5.185B (=96.6%)
One third of these revenues come from "Network web sites" (like a
section of my homepage which has the adwords code in it). The bulk of
the rest are search ads on the main page google.com. Business logic
dictates, that everything else they do can only serve one purpose and
that is to drive advertising.
I guess at a certain level of abstraction one could call the whole
Google business a "paint" business. Here is how it goes:
Browsers are the paint-crews canvases and netizens are the buyers of the
paints. Webpages are like "pigments" of this new paint formula. All the
external sites which are referenced provide the "fundamental colors"
and, yes, in this model there are billions of fundamental colors not
just a handful. Best of all for Google, most are free. But the value add
comes with Google's homemade paints - the search engine results. They
provide quality "blended pigments": Highly individualized combinations
of mixed up fundamental colors; New pigments instantly produced for
everyones taste. The binder for the paint are the tools like search,
gMail or map applications. Just like with real paint, this binder
imparts adhesion and binds the pigments together. The Internet and the
datacenters provide a form of solvent, control the flow and act as a
carrier for the non volatile components. And the ads - well, that is
easy. They are just as the word indicates - the additives. Quoting from
Wikipedia's paint article "paint can have a wide variety of
miscellaneous additives, which are usually added in very small amounts
and yet give a very significant effect on the product". Yup - Google is
in the paint business.
--Andreas
Anna Munster wrote:
> 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)
> <http://gwei.org/index.php%29>. 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/
> <http://staff.cofa.unsw.edu.au/%7Eannamunster/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
>> <mailto:frank.pasquale at gmail.com>>
>> *To:* iDC at mailman.thing.net <mailto: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
>> <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/magazine/30google-t.html?_r=2&pagewanted=print> 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 <http://www.law.yale.edu/faculty/FPasquale.htm>
>> 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 <mailto:a.munster at unsw.edu.au>
>
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