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BRIAN'S
TAKE ...
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Lessons from an unexpected search...  Dear friends, As part of my technical research for Catholica over the past month I've just finished reading "The Google Story" by David A. Vise.
I'm here to tell you today that this book certainly did provide a treasure trove not so much of technical answers but at least further starting points as to where I might go looking to find answers to my technical queries. The big, big surprise has been that this book has turned out to be also a fascinating exploration of questions that reside more properly in the realm of ethics, morality and the sort of bigger issues we're often discussing in Catholica about the meaning of our lives, our work, our responsibilities to one another and to our planet and cosmos. For those not fully aware of the Google phenomenon let me try and provide a brief overview... Most of us know Google as a convenient software program for searching the internet. It was developed by a couple of bright young PhD students at Stanford University in the early 1990s. Their names are Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Their ambition was simply to develop a better search engine than the ones, such as AltaVista, Lycos, Yahoo and the few dozen others that were then available. Within a very short space of time — one or two years — millions then hundreds of millions caught on to the fact that the Google search engine did in fact deliver superior results to any other search engine. It was both faster and through the mathematical algorithms (equations) it utilised to sort the massive amount of information that is published on the web Google provided more accurate access to the particular information searchers were looking for. In other words the information it provided tended to be far more relevant and didn't involve the user in having to trawl through pages of less relevant information to get to the precise information they were looking for. It seems they were initially and genuinely not that interested in making a huge pile of money. Their motivations were practical or utilitarian to the extent that they were simply trying to provide a better research tool for academics and students like themselves. At the time of their initial work the commercial and financial heavyweights in the world of computers thought there was "no money in search" and the major research and development was going into other areas such as the refinement of better email programs. Trying to grasp the enormous scale of the Google "success"... Even today it is very difficult for all of us, even the financial heavywieghts on Wall Street, to understand the enormous size and scale of the commercial mine that Larry Page and Sergey Brin stumbled across. It's not surprising. Most people claim they are never influenced by television advertisements — or even advertisements in newspapers. I know I read newspapers and I seem to skim past all the ads without taking them in. The truth is that I do, even in the milliseconds and nano-seconds that are involved as I scan each page of a newspaper. Advertising does work. All of us are influenced by it, albeit most of it subliminally, and the decisions we make in our lives as to what goods and services we purchase and value in our lives are heavily influenced by the vast amount of money that is poured into advertising.
Now to consideration of some more philosophical and ethical observations... Now let me turn to a number of observations I'd like to make on the Google phenomenon from the viewpoint of how we tend to look at life, and the world, within the Catholica Australia context. The Google Story is also a fascinating exploration of modern ethics. We have almost become used to stereotyping corporations, modern corporate executives and the wealthy being motivated by the bottom line of profit alone. Reading this book I could not get over how many times my mind was drawn to parallels with the thinking we were engaged in in this place in the conversation we started before Christmas on the outlook of young people. Larry Page and Sergey Brin seem to carry within them a lot of the idealism that seems to be some kind of currency with the more educated and intelligent sectors of the youthful population today. Their unofficial corporate motto is "Do No Evil" and glaringly obvious in what comes through of their personal story is that they endeavour to live it out. Interestingly, what also comes through glaringly are many of the sort of ethical and moral dilemmas that I am often trying to point to that we all face and where it is often very difficult to make the particular correct moral or ethical choice and where we are forced to weigh conflicting moral absolutes against one another in order to arrive at the particular moral truth. Only one of the many examples of this I could point to is decisions they have had to make in the last 18 months or so regarding the manner in which their business is conducted in the Republic of China. The core drive of Google is to be providing information as freely available to everyone in the world as is feasibly possible. While at the global level Google does engage in some censorship — for example they endeavour not to promote or advertise products that they perceive as being sources of "evil" — the general ethos is one of not engaging in censorship. The Chinese government though does engage in significant censorship of the internet within its own borders according to a different set of standards as to what the Chinese government considers to be "evil" — or at least harmful to the national or civil interests of the Chinese people. Real moral and ethical choices were involved in deciding whether Google would bow to the demands of the Chinese government and impose its forms of censorship on the service Google provides within that country. The Chinese government has come under criticism from Western countries for its stance on some civil rights issues and this issue of censorship of the internet, while it might be defended on some grounds — for example, in trying to stem the availability of pornography — other parts of the policy are in serious conflict with human and civil rights as we understand those rights generally within Western society or, say, at the level of the United Nations.
The ethical, moral and philosophical issues that I find raised by the Google phenomenon are too numerous to cover in a single commentary here. I hope over the next few weeks or months to raise them is various ways in our discussion forum. In general terms I find this story provides many positive lessons, inspiring examples — even of behaviours institutionalised religion might adopt in their corporate and global behaviours — as well as the very real sort of dilemmas that I believe we all face as individual moral citizens and which, today, I think the insecure and conservative elements in Catholicism simply do not understand and the institution itself seems not to give a bugger about teaching anyone. Two further issues we might discuss in more detail in our forum... Before closing this commentary today I would mention two particular issues I'd be interested in opening up in our forums... The first is that Google really does seem to be injecting a new ethical ethos into the way capitalism and Western business is conducted. These blokes broke just about every rule in the book when launching their business on the stockmarket. The drive that was underlying this desire, or need, to break all the rules that had grown up around "big business" were real issues of corporate morality, ethics and "delivering democratic decision making to ordinary people (not just the monied sectors of society)". Perhaps even more far-reaching than all of that though is the simply breath-taking moral and ethical canvas that is opening up for all of us by the future research and developments that Google is involved in. The last chapter of David Vise's book explores some of these where the technological, financial and networking might of Google is opening up issues concerning the nature of humankind, the nature of our relationship with the rest of Creation through its work with biologists, geneticists and medical researchers whose research is opening up moral and ethical issues that humankind has literally never had to consider before and at a pace which more conservative and bureaucratically-bound institutions, like national governments and the Catholic Church, simply do not have the mechanisms to keep pace with. I do highly commend this book. I purchased and sent a copy of it to my children via Dymocks but it should be readily available at all good bookstores. David Vise is an investigative journalist with The Washington Post and it is a warts and all independent investigation of the Google phenomenon. I'd endorse the cover comment from the reviewer from the Daily Mail who wrote this is "a gripping book, written like a detective story ... expertly told". Blessings, Brian
We welcome your thoughts in response to this commentary in our forum. Brian Coyne can be contacted at: |
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What
Larry Page and Sergey Brin had stumbled upon was not only a highly efficient
tool for connecting academics and research data it is also a superb tool
for connecting sellers of products and services with buyers. This very
minute — and every minute of everyday, 365 days a year — millions
of people are searching the internet for all sorts of information. The
scale is so massive that simply by charging a few cents to the relatively
tiny proportion of all those searches where they can match a buyer with
a seller the Google company that was established on the work of Larry
Page and Sergey Brin has become one of the most profitable companies ever
created. It has never had to go to some bank manager seeking a loan and
in the short space of a couple of years since it was listed as a public
company on Wall Street it has shot up to being one of the largest companies
in the world generating more revenue even, and having a larger market
capitalisation than even media giants like the Time-Warner company. The
table at right, which has been lifted from David Vise's book shows how
rapidly Google escalated up the ladder of largest US corporations between
August 2005 and June 2006.
