What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis

I just finished reading What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis and was rather disappointed. I saw Jeff Jarvis speak at the Next Web 2009 and he is an excellent speaker and certainly knows how to entertain his audience with stories. However, as a writer I am not so impressed. The book is filled with numbers and figures of revenue, clicks, marketshare etcetera. On top of that it doesn’t read like a coherent argument.

Jeff Jarvis at The Next Web 2009

Please note that this is not a book review but a collection of notes of everything that I got out of this book for my research. I tried a new notetaking system for my research: Evernote. Instead of underlining passages I took pictures of relevant paragraphs with my Google phone, the Nexus One (the pictures in this blog post are taken with my Nikon D90) and directly uploaded them to Evernote. Evernote makes my notes available everywhere and it applies text recognition to everything that I upload so my pictures become searchable.

Evernote text recognition

Life is a beta

In both the Perceived Freshness Fetish and Identity 2.0 I describe the web 2.0 culture as a beta culture. I would like to argue that web 1.0 was always ‘Under Construction’ while web 2.0 is always ‘In Beta.’ The main difference is the disruption of the updates for the user or visitor. Websites that are ‘Under Construction’ are unfinished or are in the process of being updated. They bear signs of inaccessible construction sites that depict roadblocks. It is a disruptive update process. Services such as Google’s products that are in a perpetual beta state are invisibly being updated. Platform updates do not go unnoticed to users (as can be seen in the case of privacy settings in Facebook and Google Buzz), but it does not immediately disrupt their webflow. Updates are less disruptive because they are being performed in the backend instead of the frontend.

The term beta is also a social construct in the Google world similar to the Under Construction signs indicating “I’m sorry” or according to Jeff Jarvis a way of not having to say sorry:

“Beta” is Google’s way of never having to say they’re sorry. It is also Google’s way of saying, “There are sure to be mistakes here and so please help us and fix them and improve the product. Tell us what you want it to be. Thanks.” (Jarvis 2009: 91)¹

Google’s products often start in Google Labs before they graduate for public use. The next step is usually a few years in beta which in Google terms means that the product is mature enough for public launch but that it may come with flaws. In the summer of 2009 Google decided to remove the beta label from its major products:

Today we’re paving the road. We’re taking the beta label off of Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk to remove any doubt that Apps is a mature product suite. (Rahen 2009)²

Recent Google experiments are launched in Google Labs or labelled with a Preview label instead of a Beta label, as in the case with Google Wave. Beta, as Google’s way of not having to say sorry, seems to have disappeared. However, the introduction of Google’s new service Google Buzz forced Google to publicly say sorry to its users. The service, similar to Twitter, was introduced overnight without the infamous beta/preview logo. It just appeared as a new feature within/on top of Gmail. Its default privacy settings revealed a list of contacts of “people you email and chat with most.” After complaints from users about the sudden publication of their contactlist Google admitted the ‘Buzz social network testing flaws‘ to BBC News. Products are usually extensively tested with friends/family or a relatively small set of users in a private beta. Buzz was launched without these tests and users immediately pointed to its privacy flaws. While Google considers our life to be a beta where experimentation is key, Google Buzz showed that its users base is not quite ready or interested in living life as a beta.

 

Life is a beta

1. Jarvis, Jeff. What Would Google Do? New York: Harperluxe, 2009).[↩]
2. Sheth, Rajen. “Paving the road to Apps adoption in large enterprises.” Official Google Enterprise Blog 7 Jul 2009. Web. 26 Feb 2010.[↩]

The notion of following is anthropological or ethnographic. Bruno Latour: “Follow the actors.” Now we follow all sorts of things: object, medium, money. Why follow the medium? It has to do with a particular research practice: a new medium offers new spaces and objects and new opportunities arise. For example studying the commentspace as a subspace of the blogosphere. If we were to remediate the commentspace it is potentially some kind of lively, productive area for organizing voices and mobilizing citizens. A new space for organizing or issue making. One could stay in that mode no matter which new space arises, however, Richard Rogers rather looks at the specificity of the objects of that space and asks how the devices handle them and see if we can learn, repurpose and make findings. Political scientists/students embrace the commentspace as the new hope. However, the commentspace is being ignored by devices by the implementation of the nofollow tag. The commentsphere is a messy space for engines. Engines and humans ignore it but the users are subjected to the engine regime of nofollow. What to do? Digital methods are a new recipe for new spaces: look at digital objects, how do the devices handle them? Analyze, learn and repurpose.

Presented at the DMI mini-conference, University of Amsterdam, day 2.

Introduction to my paper on Identity 2.0
Yesterday we talked about the web having technological eras, or periods of the web that have specific providers, software and templates. This is also what I indirectly undertake in my study into the reconfiguration of identity in the era of search engines. By studying different software platforms for presenting the self online through their medium specific qualities we see what Fuller calls “digital subjectivity – that software constructs sensoriums, that each piece of software constructs ways of seeing, knowing and doing in the world that at once contain a model of that part of the world it ostensibly pertains to and that also shape it every time it is used” (2003: 19)

The reconfigured relationship between the user, the platform and the search engine is studied from what Manovich calls ‘cultural software,’ a genre of software that is cultural through its use and because it carries atoms of our culture. It is an undertaking that looks at the different software platforms that have been developed over time to allow us to understand how the configuration of the ecology the software is embedded is in has changed with the advent of the search engines. The platforms: the homepage, the blog, the social networking profile, the micro-blog and the lifestream are not presented in a chronological order in order to create a teleological account, rather they are presented in more or less the order in which they came into being. All platforms for presenting the self online still exist, while one may argue that the homepage is slowly disappearing, and some platforms even co-exist in the hands of the user who integrates her Twitter account into her blog.

In general, the Digital Methods Initiative researches society through the online, however, what I aim to do is research online web culture through the online software and devices that shape it. How is this research placed within digital methods? At first it seems an ethnographical account of my Web 2.0 being placed within the studies into identity but what it aims to do is to look at the medium specific qualities of the platforms and determine their web native elements, such as the permalink or the status update, in order to see how these tie up to search-engines. In a first small casestudy, it was shown that platforms relate to each other and that some platforms are closer together than others through their entanglement of structuring natively digital objects such as site feeds and embed codes. The question then is, how to operationalize the relationship between the platforms and their distance (topological).

This paper is based on the Networked book chapter ‘Lifetracing’¹ commissioned by Turbulence. Rewritten for the Digital Methods Initiative mini-conference January 20-22, 2010 at the University of Amsterdam.

Identity 2.0: Constructing identity with cultural software.

ABSTRACT: This essay deals with the change of identity on the web as a result of the assemblage of social software platforms, engines and users. It can be stated that major platforms for presenting the self online have developed over time: the homepage, the blog, the social networking profile, the micro-blog and the lifestream. They each have their own specific way for presenting the self online. The advent of the search engine has had a major impact on both the construction and the presentation of the online identity. Search engines not only index the platforms on which identity is performed, but they also organize and construct identity online. They act as a central point where identity performance is indexed. Since identity construction and identity performance have significantly changed with the advent of these engines, identity must be reconsidered. It can be argued that the assembly of platform, engine and user has constructed a new type of identity: Identity 2.0. This type of identity, placed within the period of Web 2.0, is always under construction, never finished, networked, user-generated, distributed and persistent.

Download PDF: Identity 2.0: Constructing identity with cultural software.

1. Helmond, Anne. “Lifetracing. The Traces of a Networked Life.” Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art). 2 July 2009. Available online: http://helmond.networkedbook.org/[↩]

Last month Google announced the launch of their Real Time Search engine. By including real time search results Google has now officially embraced the updatesphere as a subsphere of “The Web,” as may be seen in the following figures.

Fig. 1: Part of the main index

Fig. 2: Updates as a subcategory of index results

Fig. 3: The updatesphere

In my real time web results Google is indexing updates performed within the three popular micro-blogging platforms: Twitter, FriendFeed and Identi.ca. Notably absent are the status updates from the social networking site Facebook because of its partial walled garden structure. However, it may not be long before these updates will be included as well because Google recently made a deal with Facebook¹. However, it is interesting to note that Google will only receive Facebook updates from public updates on pages (such as fan pages) while competing search engine Bing will receive updates from public profile pages (personal profiles) that are marked as visible for everyone.

Already in 2008 Google started expanding its indexing focus to actions within social networks but the indexed actions were quite messy, for example:

• silvertje has started 0 topics. silvertje has made 1 reply. … silvertje replied on May 13, 2009 06:25 to the question “We want all …”
• Anteek added a contact: Anne Helmond. MyBlogLog Action submitted by Anteek -
• Uploads from Anne Helmond, tagged… – http://www.flickr.com/photos/silvertje/tags/amsterdam/
• Qik | Anne Helmond | Untitled. Streamed by Anne Helmond. More at http://qik.com/silvertje.

These actions performed on social objects² such as Flickr photos, blog posts and videos, seemed to be Google’s first steps into real-time search. By partnering up with Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Identi.ca and Twitter, Google has now officially welcomed the updatesphere.

Twitters’ status updates have been included in Google’s index for a while but they are now actively promoted on the main site:

Google Social Search and the statussphere

Please note that this screenshot shows the Social Search experiment, part of Google Labs > Experimental Search. It seems that -while writing- Google removed the real-time social results from the main site and moved it to its Labs.

Status updates are moving from the Web sphere to its own distinct sphere: the updatesphere. Google is acting as a demarcating engine in the construction of the updatesphere.³

1. Google its official partners are: “Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca — along with Twitter, which we announced a few weeks ago.” Google, Relevance meets the real-time web[↩]
2. social because they the objects are part of social web services that allow other people to participate in the objects by tagging, rating, leaving a comment, embedding or favoring for example[↩]
3. For more on web spheres: R. Rogers, The End of the Virtual: Digital Methods, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009. (38p) [pre-print pdf][↩]

Dead Media/Live Nature

On October 31st I attended the first ASCA matinee with speaker Jussi Parikka from Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK. His talk, titled “Dead Media/Live Nature: Media Ecologies of Animal Intensities,” focused on the transpositions of media and nature through recent art projects such as Harwood, Wright and Yokokoji’s Eco Media (Cross Talk) and Garnet Hertz’s Dead Media lab.

In preparation of his talk we were sent three readings:

1. Matthew Fuller (2007), “Art for Animals.“
2. Jonathan Sterne, “Out with the Trash: On the Future of New Media,” in Charles Acland, Residual Media.¹
3. Garnet Hertz (2009), Dead Media Project

On the Future of New Media

Sterne describes how the “new” in new media consists of two types of newnewss for scholars:

In short, there are really two models of “newness” to which scholars of media change need to attend: (1) the “newness” of a medium with respect to other media, and (2) the so-called state of the art in design and function within a given medium.  Scholars, journalists and many others who write about computers have tended to collapse the second sense of newness into the first. (p. 18) [...] In a weird, recursive way, new media are “new” primarily with reference to themselves. (p. 19)

What constitutes the new is the halfwayness² and planned obsolescence of new media:

Combined with the “halfwayness” of most new media, planned obsolescence guarantees the continued recursive experience of digital media as “new”. The newness of new media is sustained by people continually disposing of the equipment they have in anticipation of something better. (p. 23)

I admit. I am one of those people. Last summer I replaced my fully functional 30 gig iPod video with an 16 gig iPod Touch because it offered me something more advanced and something better. Not so much storage wise but purely in functionality. I no longer see my iPod (Touch) as my iPod but as a small portable computer device (with tons of great and useless apps) that happens to play music. My other iPod is now obsolete, it lies in the corner of my room waiting to be used because it is still fully functional, yet I have discarded it as old and no longer useful. Yet, I do not throw it away. Sterne attributes this to the fact that equipment is expensive so we do not immediately throw it away after we have discarded our obsolete hardware. However, once we do, it becomes part of the junkyard of computers which leads to environmental problems. This is where Garnet Hertz’ Dead Media Project comes in.

Dead Media Project

In Hertz’ Dead Media Initiative he addresses the crossroads of media archeology and media ecology. The project links between themes of nature and technics and points to the material contexts of media. The Dead Media Project has three interests:

1. Repurposing media as a creative artistic project: it addresses the problems of electronic waste (gasses etc). A new temporality: cycle of consuming, human time of use value.
2. Extending media beyond individual use: Media as a community and artistic production as seen in do-it-yourself  and circuit bending practices. It aims to extend media to what is at hand.
3. Innovation through analysis of media history. It entails a shift of emphasis that looks as the usefulness of obsolescence: it offers us cheap research and design. The dynamics of media change.

Media as the death of nature

According to Parikka there are new waves of media studies: media archeology, media ecology and dead media studies. These semantics point to a crucial need to rethink media culture that takes into account the overlapping and boundaries of nature, technology and culture. Jussi Parikka addresses the animal forces within technology.

A medium is often described as a communication network, which is a broad definition. The Cross Talk project looks at new media spheres that pass through humans where the body becomes part of the media network. Its objective is to try to find processes in the natural world, for example bodies, as conduits for communications. What are natural technics that can function as carriers of signals or messages?

Relationality is the approxamity of relations. If you want to understand an media essemblage you have to look at its relations. What are the compositional dynamics that constitute media ecologies?³ Parikka is interested in the links between the themes of nature and technics and the material contexts of media. In his Spam Book he describes the Anomalies of Network Society which connects to his current research because it is a way of looking at media in ways it is not usually looked at. Nature has been seen as secondary signification, especially in the UK based strand of Cultural Studies which focusses on the politics of media. Nature is seen as merely  an affordance.

In a non-representational approach/analysis we could ask what kind of objects are circulating within media ecologies? Moving to the field of Software Studies, software may be used as the basis for the study of non-human autonomous agents. Examples of this type of research is focused on swarms (for example Galloway on Swarm Games) and object-oriented programming. These swarms are algorithmic insects and they are what produce second order effects.

The two strands of Media ecology (Neil Postman & Matthew Fuller) seem to be merging where, according to Parikka, media ecologies becomes less of a critique but more of a new strand.

The origins of the field of media ecology lie in the Toronto School and the New York School. In ‘What is Media Ecology?‘ Lance Strate⁴ describes it as

technological determinism, hard and soft, and technological evolution. It is media logic, medium theory, mediology. It is McLuhan Studies, orality–literacy studies, American cultural studies. It is grammar and rhetoric, semiotics and systems theory, the history and the philosophy of technology.

Neil Postman, seen as the father of Media ecology, defines it as follows:⁵

Media ecology looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival. The word ecology implies the study of environments: their structure, content, and impact on people. [...]

It tries to find out what roles media force us to play, how media structure what we are seeing, why media make us feel and act as we do.

Media ecology is the study of media as environments.

What Fuller and Parikka contribute to the Postman’s Media ecology is the increasing solidification and naturalization of the non-technological within our society. By doing so it would like to expand media studies’ agenda by borrowing from nature. Approprating and expanding our standardized uses and understandings by reconsidering what on earth have we have previously considered as media and why. Koert van Mensvoort examines this reconsideration of media and nature in the Next Nature blog. In the Next Nature publication Michiel Schwarz describes this reconfiguration of media ecology through media, technology and nature:

In the age where we have genetic engineering, artificial beaches, nature-identical food flavourings and virtual environments, what we traditionally used to view as ‘nature’ has now become an object of human design. ‘So-called nature’ has become a culturally-constructed nature in a mediated world. In this world, it is perhaps fitting that we now manipulate not only what we believed to be nature, but we happily also manipulate our images of nature. (..) What the images of multiple natures reveal to us, then, is the ‘new ecology’ in which we now find ourselves. A new ecology, where natures, technologies and media are all caught up together. (Schwarz)

1. Acland, Charles R. Residual media. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. p 16-31.[↩]
2. As described in: Pacey, Arnold. The culture of technology. MIT Press, 1983.[↩]
3. Fuller, Matthew. Media Ecologies. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005: p. 131[↩]
4. Lance Strate, “Understanding MEA,” In Medias Res 1 (1), Fall 1999.[↩]
5. Neil Postman, “The Reformed English Curriculum.” in A.C. Eurich, ed., High School 1980: The Shape of the Future in American Secondary Education (1970[↩]

Short introduction to my research in the ASCA newsletter #119, October 2009. Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam

Anne Helmond, Software‐Engine relations in the Social Web (Docent‐Promovendus, Promotor: Richard Rogers)

The research contributes to the emerging field of software studies as a branch within media studies. Software is an understudied object within media studies, yet it shapes our current media use, production and distribution. As software is increasingly moving from the desktop to the web it becomes part of a larger network where search engines play an important role. My research has found that search engines establish tight relationships with blog software, which alter both the medium and the practice of blogging. Acknowledging the important role of the engines on the web by further theorizing software‐engine relations will definitely add to the field of software studies. Therefore, I propose, to study software and engines in conjunction rather than separately and I will especially look into this new phenomenon of software‐engine relations. The question is whether it is possible to demarcate an area of study that deals with these software‐engine relations. By rethinking the role of search engines as part of the software platforms that constitute the social web it aims to contribute to a new way to study the web.