Google me : one-click democracy / Barbara Cassin
- Author:
- Cassin, Barbara
- Uniform Title:
- Google-moi. English
- Published:
- New York, NY : Fordham University Press, 2018.
- Edition:
- First edition.
- Physical Description:
- xxi, 148 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.
- Series:
- Language Note:
- Translated from the French.
- Contents:
- Introduction: Why be interested in Google? -- 1. The internet revealed through Google -- 2. Google Inc.: from search to global capital -- 3. Our mission is to organize the world's information -- 4. Don't be evil -- 5. On cultural democracy.
- Summary:
- "Google is a champion of cultural democracy, but without culture and without democracy." In this witty and polemical critique the philosopher Barbara Cassin takes aim at Google and our culture of big data. While impressed by the search engine's brilliance, Cassin enlists her formidable knowledge of the rhetorical tradition to challenge on the Google myth of a "good" tech company and its "democracy of clicks, " laying bare the philosophical poverty and political naivet that underwrites its founding slogans: "Organize the world's information, " and "Don't be evil." For Cassin, this conjunction of globalizing knowledge and moral imperative is frighteningly similar to the way American demagogues justify their own universalizing mission before the world.While sensitive to the possibilities of technology and to Google's playful appeal, Cassin shows what is lost when a narrow worship of information becomes dogma, such that research comes to mean data mining and other languages become provincial "flavors" folded into an impoverished Globish, or global English. As the Internet continues to intensify the neoliberal effacement of difference and corporate reduction of the common, Cassin's refreshing polemic takes technology seriously enough to scrutinize the beliefs upon which it operates.
- Subject(s):
- Other Subject(s):
- ISBN:
- 9780823278060 (cloth ; alk. paper)
0823278069 (cloth ; alk. paper)
9780823278077 (pbk. ; alk. paper)
0823278077 (pbk. ; alk. paper) - Bibliography Note:
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 127-146) and index.
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