Marcel Duchamps Nude on a Staircase….
Reading Jeff Jarvis’ book ‘What Would Google Do?’ I am more convinced than ever that he has painted the way the world is going to go.
The ‘google’ approach brings incredible efficiencies to almost every business, and there is little doubt that from selling books to selling plane tickets, the googlization of the world is going to happen.
The application of google-think however gives me great pause when it comes to some endeavours; but there is no such thing as a free lunch. The efficiencies and better marketing that googlized ventures bring also has, I think, a price.
And perhaps as we rush headlong into a googlized world, it might behoove us, just for a moment, to take a pause and think about the price we are going to pay.
Google, more than anything else, is based on the premise of the ‘community’. From Wikipedia to eBay to J-date to Facebook to Starbucks (and Jarvis gives example after case study after example), there are manifold benefits to creating a business that is to a large degree ‘community’ built and continually community-corrected. Jarvis refers to this as ‘the virtuous circle’. It’s a process that continues to build upon itself, constantly self-correcting.
All this is fine when you are running an online retail operation, but I begin to have my grave doubts as googlization begins to infect the world of arts, literature or journalism.
Google militates toward the center. It encourages businesses to gravitate towards the desires and opinions and tastes of the majority of consumers. It allows companies to continually understand and in a sense partner with their clients and users.
All this is great if you are selling widgets. But when it comes to arts, literature and journalism, this, I think, is counter-intuitive to what makes art or writing or journalism great.
Discomfort.
The best art, the most powerful writing, the best journalism is often that which the general public, the users don’t particularly like or appreciate.
Art and journalism and literature can from time to time, and should offend. It should shock. It should question the mainstream and force people to think hard, and to think hard, they sometimes have to be made very very uncomfortable.
This is no crime.
It is, in fact, what often separates mediocre from greatness.
Frank Lloyd Wright (whose Guggenheim is celebrating its 50th year), was no popular architect. He was, in fact, vilified. Had The Guggenheim asked What Would Google Do when it was commissioning the Guggenheim Museum on New York’s Fifth Avenue, it might have solicited hundreds of opinions or thousands from its users and from museum goers. ‘What kind of museum would you like to see’? It is unlikely that any of them would have come up with the iconic (and at the time iconoclastic) building that Wright designed.
That is genius.
Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending A Staircase was so radical, so different, so upsetting that it was withdrawn from its first cubist art show in Paris in 1913. When it was shown in New York a year later, it was vilified in the press. “An explosion in a shingle factory” wrote one pundit.
The opinion of the public was worse. Their passions ran more towards lakes, landscapes, cows and fish.
If the art world were to ask “What Would Google Do” we would have our museums filled with very ‘popular’ art, but we would never be shocked, angry, annoyed, challenged or even forced to think.
When it comes to art, or music, or literature, or journalism for that matter, I don’t particularly want what Google tells me the vast majority of people want or like or would like to see.
I want to hear from the radicals, the different, the genius…. the extremes of the spectrum.
My old mentor, Fred Friendly, used to run a series called “The Constitution, That Delicate Balance’. He filled a room with big named people and then ran them through a hypothetical case study. The hypotheticals were designed with a twist, however, and it forced these people, on TV, to make very very uncomfortable decisions. Fred used to call this ‘the agony of thinking’.
They were made to be very uncomfortable.
Being uncomfortable is not a bad thing.
It can often be a good thing.
But discomfort is not something the vast majority of people will ‘vote’ for, nor ask for.
Sometimes it has to be inflicted on them, for their own good.
And that is no bad thing.
3 Comments
Aaron May 15, 2009
I don’t know, Michael… it seems like the great inescapable Google trend to the middle has made you mighty uncomfortable.
Doesn’t that mean it’s working? 🙂
Seriously, the flaw in your logic is assuming that there is just one “community.”
There are infinite communities online, and they affect each other. Most people would be terrified to spend more than 2 minutes on 4chan’s /b/ board, but what /b/ creates has affected/infected almost every corner of the internet.
Uncomfortable creation happens all the time online, on the margins of the Google, YouTubes, and Diggs of the world. Whether it’s DeviantArt, 4chan, or LiveJournal, there are thriving communities of creators who don’t care about SEO and weekly traffic. If you want to be regularly challenged, go hang out there and try to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Most people never see the chaff that’s created in those marginal communities, yet when the time is right, their uncomfortable creations do make it out into the wild and change the world–and it doesn’t take two years of art shows on both sides of the Atlantic to do it.
Jacqueline Church May 15, 2009
“when the time is right” as decided by whom? So much content is written FOR Google analytics and jobs are paid for by companies tracking Google analytics. The sheer volume makes marginal communities unlikely to surface in any Google search. Ever try to get a live person to help with a glitch at Google? Ever get someone under the age of 30 to think outside the Google box? What if I don’t want my cat in my window on Google Maps?
Don’t get me wrong, as a kid whose childhood notion of heaven was the the place where all the answers could be found (sort of an uber library) I adore the power that is the potential here. I just think people need to question more the notion that ubiquitous = quality. What is socially useful FOR WHOM in social media is a good question to ask.
Kudos to Michael Rosenblum. I am so glad Bittman Tweeted and linked. Irony indeed, otherwise I would never have found you. Please don’t smirk Aaron, this isn’t either/or it’s both/and.
Have a great day and pull back the curtain. Ask questions, demand answers. Ponder spin.
Aaron May 17, 2009
Jacqueline, that’s exactly my point: While Google may be the great equalizer (reducing everything to a rather uninteresting mean), there are large thriving communities on the web (yes, populated by people under 30) who are very happy to fly under Google’s radar.
Have you spent any time on 4chan? The unedited side of Fark? Thousands upon thousands of internet users are thinking so far outside of Google’s box that Google has no interest in monetizing what they do — but occasionally ideas leak out to the broader internet. Those ideas do that without the help of any one editor declaring them worthy of outside consideration.
Keep in mind the vast majority of Facebook’s data is invisible to Google, and they’re the OTHER great equalizer online. As people generate their own communities and social circles intertwine, they become editors for each other, and they collectively find ideas/stories/things that are relevant to them. What’s important to understand is that there is no ONE collective.
The folks who are focused on solely on making money will continue to worship at the altar of SEO/SEM and similar snake oil salesmen. That’s fine. But it’s a mistake to think of Google as the Alpha and Omega of the internet.
Michael’s mistake on the original post is assuming that the internet means the end of human editors and curators. Far from it. It just means everyone is now a curator.