Vaidhyanathan’s point is not that Google has scammed us. He attributes the ascension of Google to a “public failure” — negligence by public stewards to preempt the privatization of knowledge and learning in the switch from analog to digital. In other words, we should have seen this coming. Did Google’s academic bloodlines lull higher education into passively supporting Page and Brin as they quietly absconded with the family jewels? Perhaps, but Vaidhyanathan is less concerned with how we got here than where we are and where we’re going. Accordingly, he proposes a sprawling effort by libraries and like-minded institutions that would essentially give Googlers a public option. “The future of knowledge — and thus the future of the species — depends on our getting this right,” he writes.

The Googlization of Everything: Interview with Siva Vaidhyanathan

February 16, 2011
Inside Higher Ed

“Uncomfortably familial.” That is how Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, describes the relationship between higher education and Google — a company that has, in a little more than a decade, evolved from pet project of Stanford doctoral students to chief usher of the information age.

The company’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, first explained their game-changing PageRank algorithm — which, drawing on the principles of peer-review (swapping citations for hyperlinks), propelled Google past incumbent search leaders AltaVista and Yahoo! — in an academic paper in 1999. Later, Page and Brin would rely on university largesse in the early days of the Google Book Search project, when major research libraries allowed the company to scan huge portions of their collections for free.

In return, Google has given higher education Google Scholar, which provides a popular bridge to otherwise obscure academic research; Google Apps for Education, which enables universities to use the company’s e-mail and communications tools, and its huge server capacity, for free; and, of course, Google Book Search — which, despite its discomfiting monopoly, gives scholars a more comprehensive body of digitized literature than has ever existed. “Google,” Vaidhyanathan observes, “is an example of a stunningly successful firm behaving as much like a university as it can afford to.”

But as is often the case with cousins, the genetic differences between higher education and Google are more striking than their similarities. Beneath the interdependence and shared hereditary traits, tensions creep. And like an awkward Thanksgiving dinner, Vaidhyanathan’s new book, The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry) (University of California Press), provokes these tensions to the surface.

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