No Other Entity

"There is no other entity on the planet that is Google," - Bob Huggins, the founder of Paper of Record

I know, I KNOW information is a commodity and that people who work to create it or organize it or make it accessible should be able to get paid for that. I realize that sort of work is the sort of thing that I, personally, and hoping to get paid a fair salary to do. So why does this article from Inside Higher Ed about Google shutting down access to a database that they paid for, fair and square, give me the willies? I can’t even really say. As I was reading it, I was self-talking myself through it -- mentally nodding and affirming – and I did fine until the end line that I quoted above. I think it’s scary to me to consider how much I rely on Google, and the greater Google Digital Empire they are building/acquiring. Empire-building makes me uncomfortable, even if everything goes OK; you are reading this on a Google product, even. The fact that this acquisition resulted in a loss of access to information that is essential to our neighbor, Mexico, well it just seems really un-neighborly to me, at least.

I think it was Gretchen who talked, one night in class, about how Google isn’t this plucky little underdog anymore, though people (including me, sometimes) forget that they aren’t. They seem fairly benevolent most of the time, but they are undeniably powerful, and they have a huge financial interest in what they do. Power + the potential for gain = trouble for regular folks, most of the time. Libraries are so important because they can protect information, somewhat, from a system of financial interests.

Another Big Brother

This story about counter-terrorism measures in the UK makes my stomach hurt, and not just because I’m a mother. Could you imagine being a school media specialist in a community with a program like this one? In the name of fighting terrorism (everyone knows it’s the new communism), children are turned over to the feds by their teachers and school administrators. When my brother was a teenager, my mom had to go talk to the guidance counselor at his school because he was drawing skulls on his notebooks. The counselor didn’t recognize that skulls and such were part of the skater culture with which my brother identified, but thought that the skulls meant that he was suicidal. If he was a kid in England today, would his teacher have skipped his mother and gone straight to the police? I’m not sure that I have the words to say how wrong this feels to me. School is supposed to be a place where children can learn and explore. The UK’s current wave of anti-terrorism measures include encouraging people to go through their neighbor’s garbage, ratting on people for looking for too long at the security cameras that are set up at bus stops and the like, and now turning in children who have aroused the hair-triggered suspicion of some under-trained, over-empowered person. There is no reason to think that this couldn’t happen here. National Security Letters to libraries and wiretaps on citizen’s phones are considered perfectly legitimate security measures. It’s only a very short leap to the kind of campaign being waged across the Atlantic.