quick note: title of this blog taken from an article in CNET news written by Matt Asay - always good to give credit :)
I admit, I do treat google as if it were God. Anything you need to know, Google is there to give you the answer. Google is unbiased. Google lets people make their own choices, at the same time as they can contribute to these choices. Matt Asay writes in his article that as Google's web dominance grows, the public seems to be losing trust in it, particularly in relation to privacy concerns. Google is all-knowing, but it also knows everything about you. Yet, while trust is dropping, Google is also acknowledging these privacy concerns and "upping its committment to open data policies." While I don't really know what is meant by "upping its committment," I do think that the main source of trust in google is the company's core philosophy of SERVING the public, rather than exploiting or deceiving the public. Or more explicitly, their philosophy to do no evil. Matt also writes: "Is google perfect? No. But it is also not a microsoft-style monopoly. Google competes in the open." And he concludes, most interestingly:
"Have we lost trust in Google simply because it is winning, and we innately suspect the worst of a company at its scale?"
This rings a bell. We do suspect the worst of a company that seems to have taken over. However, with all its open-source projects, it seems that Google has not really taken over. What has taken over is the public's obsession and interest in Google. I never see ads on TV telling people to use Google. Microsoft bombards TV with Bing ads, with almost the opposite effect. People think, perhaps without realizing it, well Google isn't trying this hard to influence people to use it. Google's trying to make people WANT to use it by focusing their energy on projects that give users CHOICE. America's all about free choice, free will, free speech. Google, as a company, gives me more faith in the potential of Corporate America to set its priorities straight.
In the late 90's, when I was in middle school, we were taught that searching the internet was potentially harmful - that you can't believe what you read on the internet and must always be skeptical because "any idiot can post anything they want on the internet." My mom still holds this old-fashioned view, that you must have the mindset to be skeptical of what you find on the internet. However, with the power of Google and other web-revolutionalizing technology, the internet IS knowledge. Not only that, but Google is knowledge based on public majority. Google tracks what people are searching, what they are using, what they are typing and saving, what they are reading, and incorporates this information to let users know what is most popular or most common among millions of other users. In this way it is unbiased towards information. If everyone on the planet suddenly starts searching for "the truth about the man in the moon" (totally hypothetical) and posting all their thoughts, research, information, and opinions about it, and Google can organize this to show which information is most cited/searched/read, then it gives us a pretty good idea of what's credible and what's not. It also gives us amazing insight into how humans think and behave. Google's corpus data is something like a sociological revolution.
But anyway, my point is that being skeptical of what you see on the internet is a given, but now there is so much information that we are free to decide what we accept or reject as good information. My mother's viewpoint is that when a professional gives you advice on a particular subject (like a doctor, educator, etc.), that advice is more sound and fool-proof than what you read on the internet. But Google gives you thousands of pieces of advice, from both professionals and lay-people, on every subject you could imagine. Perhaps I am biased, but I'm way more skeptical of one person's educated (and probably biased) professional advice than of a thousand pieces of advice (from which all the different biases basically cancel each other out). Everyone is biased in their opinion, but if you lump all the information together, assume they all have biases of some kind, and still find a strong popular consensus, then that is more trustworthy to me (in my own biased opinion...:D lolz)
On another note, I am probably more skeptical of healthcare professionals than the average person. I find it very difficult to trust what a healthcare professional tells me. It's not that I believe that doctors are lying sacks of shit who don't give a crap about their patients. There are plenty of caring, smart (smart, caring? my next post is gonna be about the order of english adjectives, just so you know) doctors, and also plenty of non-caring, non-smart (lol) doctors. The thing is, doctors don't know EVERYTHING. I think that many people have a skewed idea of doctors, almost that the doctor's word is like god's word. If the doctor said I should do it, then that's all I need to know. I tend to see the doctor's word as a recommendation, from the best of their knowledge of the situation. This means that there are also other recommendations out there, if the first one doesn't work. It doesn't mean that if one doctor recommends something and it doesn't seem to work, that there is probably nothing you can do about it. You can always do something about a healthcare issue, as long as you keep at it. Keep looking, ask other professionals, get other opinions.
To end on a random note, what's all this hype about Cloud Computing?
