Google me : one-click democracy / Barbara Cassin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cassin, Barbara, author.

Series:

Meaning systems

Standardized Title:

Google-moi. English

Language:

English

French

Subjects (All):

Google.

Electronic information resources.

Physical Description:

xii, 148 pages ; 22 cm.

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Fordham University Press, 2018.

Language Note:

Translated from the French.

Summary:

"Google is a champion of cultural democracy, but without culture and without democracy." In this witty and polemical critique, the philosopher Barbara Cassin takes aim at Google and our culture of big data. While impressed by the search engine's brilliance, Cassin enlists her formidable knowledge of the rhetorical tradition to challenge the Google myth of a "good" tech company and its "democracy of clicks." Google Me lays bare the philosophical poverty and political naïveté that underwrites its founding slogans: "Organize the world's information" and "Don't be evil." For Cassin, this conjunction of globalizing knowledge and moral imperative is frighteningly similar to the way American demagogues justify their own universalizing mission before the world. While sensitive to the possibilities of technology and to Google's playful appeal, Cassin shows what is lost when a narrow worship of information becomes dogma, such that research comes to mean data mining, and other languages become provincial "flavors" folded into an impoverished "Globish," or global English. As the Internet continues to intensify the neoliberal effacement of difference and corporate reduction of the common, Cassin's refreshing polemic takes technology seriously enough to scrutinize the beliefs upon which it operates. Book jacket.

Contents:

Why be interested in Google?

Google makes the internet apparent

Google Inc.: from search to global capital

Our mission is to organize the world's information

Don't be evil

On cultural democracy.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780823278060

0823278069

9780823278077

0823278077

OCLC:

983824498