Article from: http://alert.sqwark.me
Actual Link: http://alert.sqwark.me/?p=58
Date: April 8, 2009
Author: Admin
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Title: Google Machine Killing the News?

The Google machine continues to devour the internet landscape in the name of? That's the question. Who knows what Googles real motives are and actually I doubt they do either. Google like microsoft has become a massive profit making corporate monster but is it really their fault or just natural fallout of a sheeple mentality that pervades the net?

Google started as a quirky name with a faster than average search engine, does it really deserve to be in such an omnipotent position in just a few years since its birth? Well, truly, the only reason it has that power is the average net user has developed a sheeple mentality to simply go where they are led. Am I against google? no of course not they are a very clever company and have leveraged a huge profit through pushing the boundaries. What I question is how this really benefits the web and its users. How has it ever been in the public interest to allow such massive companies like google and microsoft etc to have such control?

Content is king on the net and where does content come from? it comes from the intellect and creativity of individuals not corporations. We have already been through an era of music companies being in control of musical creativity and then the microsoft empire dominating the very word 'pc' Yet none of these companies ever actually invented anything, they simply saw an opportunity to make money and grabbed it with both hands. There is nothing wrong about that in a free enterprise system but giving large companies, whose only motive is profit, that sort of power has NEVER been in anyone else's interest but the profit takers. Indeed, they invariably end up squashing the free development of alternative creative endeavour and actually hold back opportunity for anyone outside of their control mechanisms. You do it their way or you do it no way.

Now the large newspapers are in trouble due to the aggregation of their content. You may say, so what? they can either compete or perish. But News and the diversity of its content is vital to communication and it has a real cost to produce, reproduce and distribute. OK, so the user doesn't want to or doesn't have the money to pay for these services, so what's wrong with a huge company like Google eeking out a profit from making it available to the general public? Well, in a word, Diversity.

Diversity is the key to creativity and further development. These large companies inevitably crush opportunity and diversity and lead to a sameness that is solely based on satisfying a mass sheeple mentality. In medicine we have an old saying, 'stagnation leads to disease' that is to say when anything stops flowing, pathology is a natural result. This is exactly what has led to music and the arts to be crushed into brand names, product identities and fake personalities by those who seek to control and make profit from the things they are not capable of creating themselves.

So am I just jumping on the corporate bashing train? No, on the contrary, I am challenging our own stupidity as consumers and punters. It's time we stood up and demanded diversity, demanded ingenuity and got off our arses to contribute to the process rather than feed off the mindlessness that drives profit making empires. Every time you get something for free, someone else is paying the price and in the end that goes all the way back to the original creator. It's harder than ever to make a profit from your work in any creative field.

Google claims to aid the community in the same way that microsoft claimed to be advancing the use of computers, and in some ways they are right. Did google ever invent anything but a search engine? NO it bought out other peoples ideas for huge amounts of YOUR money and paid individuals with the knowledge to create it for them. Microsoft has actually held back development, its inefficient and over burdened operating system has taken the idea that an OP makes computers MORE efficient and crushed it into a badly written resource hungry 'program' that runs other programs... a completely unnecessary middle man to processes and functions... just another branding mentality that trades and profits from our sheeple mentality... and don't think Apple is any better! they are just less successful!

If you apply the microsoft example to Google with its desire to create cloud computing and own your computer time too, I predict, we will see the very same mechanism that seeks to control begin to crush all but the middle of the road and the net will become a stagnant wasteland of lost opportunity for the individual who actually creates the content. A sameness will develop and begin to crush rather than invigorate. Will you come to hate the word Google? Well, lets wait and see, there are already far better uses of the english language!

How do we defend ourselves from all this? Support the individual, support Open source software development like Linux and above all else, try to PAY something, even a few cents, for things that individuals develop through their own creativity. Times are tough, why give what little you have to huge profit making megaliths? Look for ways to support individual growth and learn to pay a fair price to content creators, not the middlemen who feed off others. Ask yourself why you go to university or seek higher training? Just to see you hard work consumed by a thing called a GOOGLE?

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