Naturally, I had begun to write a post this weekend about l’affaire Buzz and the attendant privacy concerns, but alas I was rather beaten to the punch by seven or eight million other people. So, no post from me explaining how Google Buzz marked little more than the further erasure of the line between your personal correspondance and the demographic data on a marketing man’s crib sheet. No, no post indeed.
And boy am I thankful I refrained! For, lo, what obscenely wealthy corporate schill through yonder window breaks? Why, ’tis the stern Uncle to Page and Brin’s excitable infants, Eric Schmidt. Eric, some of you will recall, is the one who makes all the actual decisions chez Google, and Eric, well, Eric thinks it ever so important for us all to understand that we were confused about Buzz:
“There was a lot of confusion when it came out on Tuesday, and people thought that somehow we were publishing their email addresses and private information, which was not true.”
Except that – and call me hopelessly recherche – I rather consider my list of email contacts and the relative frequency with which I use them, to be private information. But, thanks to Eric (who I always think has rather the appearance of a mid-level Congressman from Kansas) I now realise that I was wrong. Confused even.
Thus, like the ditzy 1950s housewife that Schmidt apparently considers me as a Google user to be, I find myself so grateful at having mine error pointed out to me that I yearn for more words of electronic wisdom. Pray, Eric, is there perhaps some laughably misapplied psychology metaphors you could drop into your discourse on the mobile computing era? Mais bien sur:
“A phone is no longer a phone, it’s your alter-ego… It does not think as well as you do, but it has a better memory. It has a more accurate idea of where you are. It can take pictures better than we can remember things.”
Crashingly boorish of me as it may be to press the point, but Eric, dearest, I think there is some confusion: something is only an alter ego if it resides within a person, comes from within same, and can operate independently of the original ego. So, no. A phone may no longer be a phone, but it is not an alter ego, for lo, it sits in your hand, not in your pscyhe.
Which, in a rather round about way, brings me to wonder about Google’s own rich inner life. When first I beheld Buzz (which we must acknowledge to be the attempt at producing a male heir after Wave’s stillborn girl in the sixteenth-century dynastic saga which is Google’s attempt to run the world) I, in my confusion, could not quite see the point. I have Facebook and Twitter for this sort of thing. Meh, and other such lolleries. But then I read, in some of the web’s finest techblogs, that Buzz was Google’s ‘Twitterkiller’. Twitterkiller.
Putting aside tech business journalism’s utterly sweet, boyish insistence upon mistaking social tech roll-outs for scenes from The Hurt Locker, I found myself thinking: why. Why does Google want to kill Twitter? Is Google somehow loosing money to Twitter? Is Twitter somehow a really good search engine used by billions across the globe? No, and no. And then, as I wallowed deeper in the Buzz coverage, some brightspark noted it as Google’s ‘answer to Facebook’. Dear God, what was the question? Was it ‘can Google have a monopoly over all forms of social technology? well, can we?’
As exercises in futility go, mocking Google’s ‘dont be evil’ motto is right up there with trying to get decent coverage of the Winter Olympics from NBC here in the US. But again and again Google just seems to expanding into arenas that no-one other than Google really wants them to be in. Of course, of course, shareholder value etc etc and the unanswerable logic of global capitalism wants Google to do this. Wants it to expand into all corners of one’s digital life. But me, I like a little diversity in my online offerings.
Doubtless, of course, I am confused.
