Leah Lievrouw

New Network Theory, huh

June 28th, 2007

Greetings from Amsterdam, where Geert Lovink and his associates are running the New Network Theory conference and we conferees are now embarked on a day-long plenary session of talks by all and sundry worthies in the net culture landscape, au courant…(I realize I did a lecture for a big undergraduate class in this very room a few years ago, strange)…

Kickoff just finished, by Siva Vaidhyanathan, whose current project (and soon-to-be book) appears to be an all-round thrashing of the ‘invisible’ damage being done to culture by Google…

His objections were all reasonable, all the usual: destruction of intellectual property and personal privacy, reshaping (i.e., deforming) authentic culture, corporate and technological opacity and barony, &c. &c. I’m sure the book will sell.

His premise was that we’ve come to talk about Google in theological terms, and that the Google folks themselves encourage this through their familiar “don’t be evil”-type approach to their public communications. He thinks their stated aim to eventually provide universal access to all information is basically cynical at worst, unrealizable at best.

Vaidhyanathan didn’t mention that this notion is hardly new; we might call it the “Alexandrian impulse” after the ancient library, a dream that is alive and well in library/archive circles. Think H.G. Wells’ “world brain,” think Paul Otlet’s gorgeously ruined “Mundaneum” in Brussels, think Vannevar Bush’s technologically-driven version, the “memex”…ideas that I dare say are still the driving visions for most designers and advocates of digital libraries.

OK, it’s idealist, it’s modernist, guilty, guilty. And it’s obviously difficult to square the Alexandrian dream with our persistent (and so American) mistrust of monopolies of any sort. Vaidhyanathan, for example, decries Google’s Book Search project (and their operation of YouTube) as ‘inviting’ a nasty copyright backlash from the media & entertainment industries. But I wonder, if the legal and institutional barriers that maintain indefensible inequities of access to information are ever to be challenged, who better — or larger — a champion might there be than Google to do the heavy lifting, with their capital, lawyers, and pro-social image to promote?

L

Entry Filed under: MediaNouveau, CulturlStudys