“Google makes it harder than ever to escape the past,” Lawrence Lessig told the New York Times a while back, noting that “we haven’t developed effective norms yet for all the relationships that develop” because of Google and the Internet. Now Jeffrey Rosen writes that “an etiquette is beginning to emerge” regarding the sharing of personal information online. “I would never reveal the identity of a date — it violates the honor among bloggers,” one blogger told Rosen. As personal bloggers proliferate, a stigma against revealing others’ personal information may be the only way to reclaim an expectation of privacy. Rosen suggests that the “blogging community” police itself by shaming unscrupulous bloggers. But Simson Garfinkel thinks the problem isn’t so serious.
THE MIND OF GOD: In related news, both the Boston Globe and the New York Times run editorials today on Google’s book-scanning project. One of the co-founders of Google, Sergey Brin, has said that the perfect search engine “would be the mind of God,” all-knowing and able to “give you back exactly what you need.” Well, Google is at least adding the inventories of five great libraries (Stanford, Harvard, Oxford, the University of Michigan, and the New York Public Library) to its wealth of information. The Globe opines, “Trying to access the world’s overflow of information can be like trying to take a drink from Niagara Falls. This project should tame the flow.” But doesn’t Googlizing libraries seem more like opening the floodgates, letting loose an undifferentiated mass of information without the organization that a library (or a physical book) typically provides? Just as the web demanded portals, directories, and blogs, some digital equivalent of the Dewey decimal system is bound to arise. Still, Boolean searches seem a far cry from the mind of God.
–Steven Menashi
The Dish 