Debatten kring Google Books i svenska medier har kört fast i de juridiska hjulspåren. Ett exempel är en artikelserie i SvD, med ett inlägg av Karl-Erik Tallmo idag.
Upphovsrätt i all ära, men det finns andra saker att diskutera. Som kvaliteten på det Google gör. En lång post på Languagelog (med kommentarer), skriven av Geoff Nunberg och en artikel i The Chronicle of Higher Education är läsvärda texter. (”The 2003 edition of Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (misdated 1899) is assigned to Health & Fitness” och så vidare…)
Av intresse är även en motsvarande kritik mot kvaliteten på Google Scholar (Peter Jacso i Library Journal). Man bara väntar på vad som ska hända när Google Scholar börjar användas som bibliometriskt verktyg i olika sammanhang.
But now, as we face the impending Googlization of everything, we should ask some hard questions about how Google is not only “creatively destroying” established players in various markets, but is also altering the very ways we see our world and ourselves.
If Google becomes the dominant way we navigate the Internet, and thus the primary lens through which we experience both the local and the global, then it will have remarkable power to set agendas and alter perceptions. Its biases are built into its algorithms. It knows more about us every day. We know almost nothing about it.
The company itself takes a technocratic approach to any larger ethical questions in its way: they are engineers. Every potential problem is either a bug in the system yet to be fixed or a feature in its efforts to provide better service. This attitude masks the fact that Google is not a neutral tool or flat plane of glass. It is an actor and a stakeholder in itself. And more importantly, as a publicly traded company, must act in its own short-term interest despite its altruistic proclamations.
Ett utsnitt ur ett bokupplägg (med support från The Institute for the Future of the Book) som kan bli intressant (läs resten av upplägget här). Siva Vaidhyanathan bloggar sitt bokprojekt längs vägen.
[via Crooked Timber.]
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