Googledentity
Google makes us smart or dumb? Rich or poor? Black or white? Agency, as some believe, is at the heart of the Google phenomenon. The question may not be “What do images want,” as Mitchell asked once, but, as Google critics or lovers note, “What does Google want?” What does Google do to me? These folks are scared or fascinated. Google has agency? Indeed. Maybe an implicit one. Or an extension of man, as McLuhan would say.
The phenomenon of Googledentity. Google bombing. Ego surfing. Page ranks. These are the attributes of Googledentity, the struggle to simultaneously be linked and then to lament or praise the act of linking. Carr, like others before him, worries over decaying reading and writing skills as well as the automation of the human. An early example is that Google prevents folks like him from reading War and Peace. Google makes Carr like substances want to read short pieces, not long and windy narratives. Of course, with or without Google, I don’t want to read War and Peace.
In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.
Then let’s assume we are machines. Machines like Burroughs’ writing machine that is half text half human devouring and copying and appropriating cultural moments and ideas. To me, this is the Googledenity. All your links belong to me. I am the link. In my Googledentity, I link to Sam Malone pretending to read War and Peace so that he might impress Diane. My identity is made up of links. Viral connections. Hubs of information. I just pushed that one link of Cheers to the top of my imaginary page rank.
Google lists. Imagine Walt Whitman singing of himself. Those long lists of descriptions. I am the poet of this….I am the poet of that. In “I Sing the Body Electric,” the lists become the body itself.
Upper-arm, arm-pit, elbow-socket, lower-arm, arm-sinews, arm-bones,Wrist and wrist-joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, fore-finger, finger-balls, finger-joints, finger-nails,
Broad breast-front, curling hair of the breast, breast-bone, breast-side,
Ribs, belly, back-bone, joints of the back-bone,
Hips, hip-sockets, hip-strength, inward and outward round, man-balls, man-root,
Strong set of thighs, well carrying the trunk above,
Leg-fibres, knee, knee-pan, upper-leg, under leg,
Ankles, instep, foot-ball, toes, toe-joints, the heel;
All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your body, or of any one’s body, male or female.
Googledenity, though, must mean more than a list of body parts. All Yahoo or Netscape could muster in their early days was just that: an index. A displayed index. What makes Google more than an index? Google bombing. Ego surfing. Page ranking. Links. Connections. Scans upon scans upon scans upon scans sent out among each other to be displayed in various hierarchies or found by chance or focused in upon (site:) or. . . .
I sing the body digital.
You should try Googling the folks in English. The MU English Dept. has been comprimised.
Comment by comoprozac — June 12, 2008 @ 2:23 pm
I know this is a tangential thing to your larger (and excellent) post, but– I’d also take issue with that guy’s description of 2001 as “Kubrick’s dark prophecy.” I don’t know– when it isn’t a boring sci-fi window display (which isn’t a bad thing– as Andy Warhol said, “I like to be bored”), I always got the sense that Kubrick found a lot of humor in the his vision of the future, and was kind of geeked about the possibilities of the new machine age. And why not? Those are the very tools Kubrick and special effects guru Douglas Trumbell are taking advantage of to craft the movie, and Kubrick’s whole aesthetic after this film could be called computerized– hyper-organized, cold, cerebral, with a narrative made up of implied links between images rather than explicit meanings (that controlled, fetishized style is what students often respond to in the work– they find beauty in it). That the quoted writer chooses to read it as bleakness says more about him and his paradigms than it does about the movie, I think.
Comment by Brian — June 13, 2008 @ 2:14 pm
I agree. 2001’s slow pace is very much an organizational scheme. And there is humor. I’m thinking about the subtle kind of joke when - if I remember right - they are being served by stewardesses on this future flight.
Carr, in case you don’t know, is a Neil Postman-like critic whose job is to critique new media for doing us wrong.
Comment by jrice — June 13, 2008 @ 2:24 pm
“Carr, in case you don’t know, is a Neil Postman-like critic whose job is to critique new media for doing us wrong.”
Ah! Just what we need!
Comment by Brian — June 13, 2008 @ 11:55 pm
I’ll add some further superlatives to those above and add: Damn!, never thought I’d see you cite Whitman.
If the rhetoric thing doesn’t work out, maybe you could go into 19th cent. AmLit after all ;0)
Comment by Mike — June 14, 2008 @ 2:19 am
Well, I did begin as an Americanist after all. Wait until I bring back Melville.
Comment by jrice — June 14, 2008 @ 7:54 am