When I first saw Mushon’s post sitting there, ominously, in the draft folder a couple days before last Tuesday’s meeting, I got worried. I was sort of hoping he was just referring to some other experiment that a bunch of far-off people had done and that he would never, ever dream of asking his wonderful students to do something so cruel.
And this was even before I found out he meant ALL of Google — I was just panicking trying to think of a way to live without Google Search.
It went downhill from there.
One one hand, I knew I wouldn’t like removing Google from life — between searching and YouTube alone, I’m hooked.
On the other hand, my job depends on Google. Well, make that jobs — basically, I’d have to drastically re-structure my professional life if I were to permanently cut out Google. The interesting thing about that isn’t just that Google is really ingrained into my professional habits — Google is also a standard in the online industry. Its numbers tend to be trusted — Google Analytics for measuring site traffic, Google Search for measuring inbound links (and for search engine optimization purposes), and until a few years ago, Google PageRank was the best and simplest way to quantify a web site’s influence.
I intern in new media at Bad Boy Entertainment, where my job includes scouring Google News for relevant media for all the Bad Boy web sites, and helping maintain the Bad Boy YouTube Channel. So, it was darn near impossible to avoid Google during those days.
Last semester, I interned in London at a social media consultancy and have stayed on as part of their staff to do research for their various social media endeavours through my own company. Its included blogging on their company site and social media research. I’ve spent the past few weeks working on a case study of free tools available to analyze our social media footprint — with an emphasis on the Google Suite (Google Trends, Google Groups, Google Blog Search…). So, I had to break and use Google when working for them, too, since it’s hard to write a case study on Google Trends without, you know, actually using it.
I find it just as interesting that not only are dozens of people’s careers dependent on one platform, that there’s another large sect of people frantically studying Google’s effect on our behaviors (which includes us).
One Comment
It is really amazing how much Google has crept into the lives of everyone… both professionally and personally. There’s been a lot of hype in the last few years about the internet really going corporate, net neutrality, etc. It’ll be interesting to see whether this site, an internet vice for most of the world, will sell out, or if they’ll remain true to the little guys, like you and me, and let us fairly search for the information we need sans much bias or cost.