Just joking.
If you’re reading this post then you’ve probably flicked through a few of my others; if so you’ll know I consider myself in conflict with much of the twenty-first century; despite this I do embrace the majority of transformation occurring, including the technological. And you’ve also probably discovered that I live in two countries - not simultaneously of course! And these two realities have led me to the issue that I’m exploring here.
My mobility has forced me to embrace one distressing decision; I now almost never buy paper books anymore because their weight and volume are prohibitive. Why distress? Because I am someone who cherishes books and I’ve bought thousands which explains, in part, how I have managed to remain a pauper even while enjoying a handsome salary for years. Books have been an obsession throughout my life and even now, after taking extreme steps to de-clutter my life, I have hundreds in storage.
Winston Churchill explained how I feel about books so much better than could I: "If you cannot read them, any rate … fondle them. Peer into them … let them fall open where they will, … Set them back on the shelf with your own hands … If they cannot be your friends, let them at any rate be your acquaintances."
Alas now my books are but ephemeral wisps of digital data on by eReader, my tablet, and my phone; sadly there’s no fondling these ‘books’, and I’m not sure I can make, or want to make, the acquaintance of millions of bits and bytes - especially when they are arranged with so little attention to aesthetics. So in the search for mobility I have eschewed leather and other lustrous bindings, thick creamy deckle-edged paper, textures, the visual allure of fonts beyond Times and Arial postscript, and I’ve sold my soul to clinical technology in return for the promise of digital transcontinental transportability.
The other day I was thinking about what we consumers have come to accept as being perfectly acceptable treatment in this digital age.
Let’s imagine, for a moment, that as you approached the entrance to your favourite bookstore you were asked to produce some identification before being allowed inside; few of us, I suggest, would consider this acceptable treatment.
And yet that’s exactly what happened to me the other day when I was challenged for ID as I tried to access the Amazon Kindle store on my smartphone; I meekly waited until I returned home and browsed Amazon on my laptop without needing to login.
How compliant I’ve become; and how little about this experience seems to shock, or enrage. I suppose the rationale for providing an ID is security although if some other person shoulders their way into my Kindle store what are they going to do? Buy me some books? Doesn’t sound like much of a scam to me.
And our compliant state is even more surprising because access to the world’s knowledge is rapidly being monopolised by a diminishing number of companies. And I wonder if that isn’t a cause for concern because access to knowledge is fundamental to many of the freedoms that we enjoy.
In around 50BC the great library at Alexandria, the greatest centralised knowledge repository of the known world, was razed to the ground and it plunged civilization back into an era in which written knowledge was scattered, scroll by scroll, from central Asia to the western gateway of the Mediterranean and exchanging knowledge happened at the speed of a cart, and even then, only to and from where cart tracks led.
This knowledge fragmentation had considerable impact because the educated, and their masters, were the sole custodians of, and gatekeepers to, knowledge and this created a world in which few knew what knowledge was available, the benefits to be gained from accessing it, or where it resided; across Europe the dark ages was probably extended hundreds of years by this barrier to accessing knowledge.
So knowledge dispersal worked against human advancement by promoting ignorance and perverting thought.
Then the advent of movable type and the printing press opened the floodgates and knowledge flooded the world; knowledgeflood 1.0 is perhaps how we would describe it today.
Now the Internet and search engines have enabled knowledgeflood 2.0, and we have the best of both worlds: decentralised and disseminated knowledge which is simultaneously centralised through the wizardry of the Internet; my browser converts my laptop to the world’s largest library and archive.
For me the convenience of digital books is fantastic and I have hundreds of books stored on my tablet, a device the size of a small paperback - and I also have hundreds in storage that take up the space of a two car garage; so I’ve made progress - at least in the volumetric sense. And in my life, one is carry on baggage, and the other would max-out my Visa card at check-in.
So what’s to worry about? Well - it’s not the convenience of knowledge digitisation, or the increase in the types of media upon which knowledge can now be stored and distributed, and it’s not even the capability to share using the Internet; rather it’s that once upon a time when I bought a book - I owned that book - and I could have that book in my possession. But now ownership and access is far less certain with digital knowledge.
In ‘The Googlization of Everything’ Siva Vaidhyanathan writes, ‘... there has never been a company with explicit ambitions to connect individual minds with information on a global - in fact universal - scale. The scope of Google's mission sets it apart from any company that has ever existed in any medium.
He also writes ‘ … no single state, firm or institution in the world has as much power over Web-based activity as Google does.’
And, ‘Google is the dominant way we navigate the Internet, and thus the primary lens through which we experience both the local and the global, and it has remarkable power to set agendas and alter perceptions. Its biases (valuing popularity over accuracy, established sites over new, and rough rankings over more fluid and multidimensional models of presentation) are built into its algorithms. And those biases affect how we value things, and navigate the worlds of culture and ideas. In other words we are folding the interface and structures of Google into our very perceptions’.
I wonder, is civilisation up for sale?
And how easily could access convenience be replaced by inconvenience? Perhaps digitisation is a two edged sword?
Imagine, for example, we awakened one morning and collectively tried to log on to Google only to discover that access was denied because Google had been acquired by an totalitarian regime, or access suddenly depended on a hefty fee, or that our digital book provider had gone broke, and our books were no longer available to us.
Now it would be possible to see this post as anti-Internet or anti-Google - but quite the reverse - the services that Google provide or enable are now central to my life - and that again is the point.
The other day as I explored blogging I thought I would discover what the Google AdSense service offered and to astonishment I was confronted with a message telling me that my AdSense account had been frozen due to inappropriate activity that breached my agreement with Google; this news was delivered with the reassuring words that if I wanted to complete a comprehensive questionnaire then Google may reconsider my case.
As an aging warrior I am often begrudging in my adherence to stupid laws and moronic guidelines - but even so I don’t break the law, especially when my opponent would be global giant Google so I’ve certainly done nothing to earn this rebuke - and I can be sure of this because I’ve never attempted to access the AdSense service; I’m absolutely sure of my innocence!
Now I’m not sure if you have you ever tried to speak to anyone at Google? Forget it, they’ve never heard of the device that most of us use to communicate when it really matters - the telephone.
So I eventually sent Google this message: ‘I am astonished. To the best of my knowledge I have never given Google any occasion to treat me in any way than a valued user. I have to say that the complete inability to engage with someone also astonishes me. It is somewhat reminiscent of a 'star chamber' where I stand accused of some unknown act and I have been offered no explanation, no charges have been laid, I have no assistance in preparing or delivering my defense, and I have no way of assessing the likelihood of reprieve. Dreadful.’
Google had warned me that any plea might fall on deaf ears, that any complaint against me might be upheld and I would remain a cyber black sheep, or that I may get an answer in three or four weeks - they acknowledged they don’t have many resources dedicated to reviewing these cases of infringement. I never received a reply.
Perhaps after all this you’re thinking so what? Good question and I’m not sure I have a complete answer. In short I’m pleased that so much information is accessible. But I do wonder what would happen if our access to the knowledge base were restricted - and of course, it’s not just knowledge because Google, and the Internet, are now such an essential part of my life; I am now, as it were, ‘in the cloud’.
Now Google is the custodian of this blog draft, and the blog itself, twenty-five thousand of my photographs are out there, together with more and more of my documents spinning through cyberspace, my diary, your twitter address, and my to-do lists, the pages of my digital notebooks, and my banking details, my health records, tax records, my accounts and … what else is there?
Gulp. I hope no one pulls the plug without warning! Because if they do, the cyber-me will disappear. And I’ll be left without my ID!
