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Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge: A View from Europe
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by Jean-Noel Jeanneney, Ian Wilson, and Teresa Lavender Fagan
Sales Rank: 411057
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Discount: 15 %
List Price: $11.00
$9.35
At Amazon
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Paperback: 108 pages
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; Reprint edition October 15, 2007
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0226395782
ISBN-13: 978-0226395784
Product Dimensions:
8.3 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
From Booklist
*Starred Review* From Europe's point of view, Google's proposal to digitize the contents of America's leading libraries raises questions beyond the copyright issues that presently beleaguer the project. This brief salvo from the president of France's Bibliotheque Nationale challenges directly Google's assertion that its venture offers a source of universal knowledge. Jeanneney finds such a claim spurious and utopian. For by the very nature of the library collections that Google proposes to put online, American and British works will dominate, leaving behind that portion of the world's hundred million books not in English. Moreover, the character of digital search engines necessarily ranks results according to algorithms that reflect prejudices that lack universal validity. This quarrel is at least as ancient within librarianship as card catalogs. Jeanneney believes that Google's retrievals as presently constituted pass to the reader the merely noetic, not truly the intelligent, insightful, thoughtful, and genuinely helpful information implied by the notion of universal knowledge. Google's commercial status also troubles Jeanneney, for the commoditization of information by a single corporation inevitably subjects it to sale and to control by a less-benign owner. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Book Description
The recent announcement that Google would digitize the holdings of several major libraries sent shock waves through the book industry and academe. Google presented this digital repository as a first step towards a long-dreamed-of universal library, but skeptics were quick to raise a number of concerns about the potential for copyright infringement and unanticipated effects on the business of research and publishing.
Jean-Noël Jeanneney, president of France’s Bibliothèque Nationale, here takes aim at what he sees as a far more troubling aspect of Google’s Library Project: its potential to misrepresent—and even damage—the world’s cultural heritage. In this impassioned work, Jeanneney argues that Google’s unsystematic digitization of books from a few partner libraries and its reliance on works written mostly in English constitute acts of selection that can only extend the dominance of American culture abroad.
As a leading librarian, Jeanneney remains enthusiastic about the archival potential of the Web. But he argues that the short-term thinking characterized by Google’s digital repository must be countered by long-term planning on the part of cultural and governmental institutions worldwide—a serious effort to create a truly comprehensive library, one based on the politics of inclusion and multiculturalism.
“The president of the French national library has made himself the frontman in what he sees as a struggle to save cultural diversity. In the postmodern world, the battleground is the Internet. Here, search engines determine what tomorrow's generations will click on, learn and think.”—Financial Times
Customer Reviews & Comments
This review is from: Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge: A View from Europe (Hardcover)
Jean-Noël Jeanneney, the president of the National Library of France, sounds a clarion call to his fellow Europeans: organize a large-scale, Europe-wide digitization project or risk ceding the dissemination of Europe's cultural heritage to the whim of an American corporation. He argues not so much against the globalization of knowledge per se but more against what he considers Google's incomplete form of globalization, which inevitably favors Anglo-American cultural products above the rest of the world's. The alternative Jeanneney proposes relies primarily on public funding; although he does not exclude the participation of the private sector, he would like to see the European response to Google emerge from carefully crafted agreements between national libraries and other cultural institutions. Jeanneney comes across as a savvy politician who knows how to organize European-wide initiatives. He puts together a long list of all the national and European agencies he thinks should become involved in the project. The number of people from different agencies and industries and nations who need to be consulted contrasts sharply with Google's straight-forward plan to get started. I guess a lot depends on whether you think good ideas emerge more frequently from garages in Silicon Valley or meeting parlors in Brussels. Pragmatists like William James and John Dewey taught Americans to exercise healthy skepticism against affording "experts" in any field of knowledge an undue level of influence. The democratization of knowledge should generally decrease the cultural weight of the elite, who tend to privilege their social situation more than they let on. Is the danger of political elitism not as serious as that of economic plebeianism? Obviously, Jeanneney speaks to Americans across a philosophical divide about the role of the state in promoting culture. Jeanneney is at pains throughout "Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge" to make clear that he is offering a constructive proposal. However, despite his protestations that he is not out simply to criticize Google, his argument depends on demonstrating that Google has gone about digitizing and organizing the world's information in a wrongheaded way. "...The errors (I'm speaking euphemistically) committed by Google are instructive," he writes. "Whatever it does, we should do the opposite." Jeanneney's argument against Google's approach to digitization fails in the end to convince in part because he operates with several unconvincing assumptions. His fundamental presupposition is that not all printed books can be digitized. This leads him to pose the all-important question of how properly to select those books which will be digitized. However, is it really "beyond what we can reasonably envision" to conceive of digitizing "all the books that have been printed since the time of Gutenberg"? Google has made a prodigious start toward this goal and has since been joined by Microsoft and other competitors. Who is to say that the vast majority of the world's literature will not eventually be digitized because of such private initiatives? The objection that selections must be made will then be rendered moot, as Jeanneney tacitly concedes. Among his other questionable assumptions is, for example, Jeanneney's contention that Google's search technology homogenizes knowledge by returning over and again only the most highly-ranked results. He worries about the cultural effect of returning what he terms the "gondola end" of information, by which he means that only the most popular books will be seen by most searchers. The underlying worry is that French and other European literature will never be discovered. It's interesting to juxtapose Jeanneney's concern about the "gondola end" of searches with Chris Anderson's discussion of the "long tail." Anderson argues convincingly that the digital era has greatly expanded our access to otherwise inaccessible and difficult-to-find materials. His claim is that the real action is in the "long tail," not in the "gondola end," and that cultural sphere has become far richer and more diverse since the commercialization of the Internet. What makes Google such a good search engine, after all? Among its virtues is its uncanny ability to return the needle-in-the-haystack result, which might otherwise remain hidden forever in some obscure webpage. Google is all about discoverability, not about simply directing its users to the same old sites over and again. Why shouldn't Google's Book Search operate the same way? Jeanneney makes much of the distinction between information and knowledge. He cites Michael Gorman, past president of the American Library Association, with approval for contending that that books should be read all the way through, not simply as snippets. It's not the case, however, that most users are seeking to replace the experience of reading books with searching for snippets in books. What many scholars are looking for when using Google Book Search is a list of books to read. Again, it's about discoverability. Google Book Search provides information about where to go about gaining knowledge. It may be that the next place to turn is the library or bookstore. Jeanneney recognizes as much when he argues that new forms of media do not generally replace the media which preceded it. He contends, quite rightly in my estimation, that Google Book Search will not replace the printed book. (Why he feels it necessary then to advocate protectionist policies for bookstores and publishers is not clear.) Google provides an additional tool for gaining knowledge. Let's hope that Jeanneney's Europeans will contribute another such tool. "Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge" provides valuable insight into the way that traditional European librarians and brokers of culture think. Jeanneney provides a good case for taking a more cautious and methodical approach to digitization and organization, although American readers will have to disregard a few silly and nonsensical digs against market-oriented capitalism when reading it. "Upon what principle is [Google's search algorithm] founded?" asks Jeanneney. "Like the basic ingredient of Coca-Cola, it remains a well-guarded corporate secret." (I'm confident that Coca-Cola's basic ingredient is water in any case.) But, in general, Jeanneney's book serves its readers by raising critical questions about the commercial origins of many current digitization projects and by pointing out the cultural significance of making the full variety of the world's printed literature more readily accessible to anyone with access to an Internet connection.
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Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge: A View from Europe
List Price: $11.00
Discount: 15 %
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Price: $9.35
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