Covering your tracks, c. 1660
Google’s announcement that they’re going to stop censoring their Chinese search results in response to a cyberattack targeting Gmail accounts of Chinese dissidents is big news, but I wanted to look* at some older instances of political attempts to control information (and of users to hide it).
Samuel Pepys, the only person more famous for writing a diary than Anne Frank, had a problem. He’d bought this book, Mare Clausum by John Selden, in a 1652 translation that included a lavish dedication “To the Supreme Autoritie of the Nation: The Parliament of the Commonwealth of England.” The trouble is that in 1660, Charles II was restored as king of England. Whoops.
In 1663 a new edition – keeping Nedham’s translation, but changing the title page – had been published by two booksellers called Andrew Kembe and Edward Thomas… For readers who already owned the 1652 edition, and who didn’t want the shame of the old title page but were reluctant to shell out for a new one, there was another option. The bookseller Robert Walton was offering a new title page that could be bound or pasted into the old edition, restoring the dedication to Charles I.
Pepys was nothing if not politic and practical, so on 17 April 1663, he visited Walton to paste the new title page into his book. Pepys also burned books that he thought might incriminate him, either with the government or his wife, as in the case of a French book Pepys found pornographic:
Friday 7 February 1668. We sang till almost night, and drank my good store of wine; and then they parted and I to my chamber, where I did read through L’Escholle des Filles; a lewd book, but what doth me no wrong to read for imagination’s sake (but it did hazer my prick para stand all the while, and una vez to decharger); and after I had done it, I burned it, that it might not be among my books to my shame.
As Nick Poyntz (who blogged about this at Mercurius Politicus) wrote: “This is the seventeenth-century equivalent of wiping your browser history.” Awesome.
* Actually, I was going to write about Pepys anyway. But Google! China! Crazees.
Feet on the ground from far away
This little postlet on a tumblr that hails from Minnesota—
—made me stop and go: A-ha! We all do this now, don’t we?
When I was looking for a new apartment a year and a half ago, there were a couple of days where I spent more time in Google Street View than in, uh, the real street. When I was scouting hotels in Paris last spring, I’d position my little yellow avatar at the front door of, say, the Hotel la Demeure and then take a test stroll. Did the Paris that stretched out there seem fun—or foreboding?
And of course it goes beyond Street View. We’re all satellite analysts now; looking for an apartment, I quickly learned the overhead signature of my favorite kind of street. It’s a certain width, with a certain density of dark-green tree splotches and a certain number of missile silos.
But this is all very pedestratian; very practical. You can also think about Google Street View as a new kind of street photography. Jon Rafman scouts Street View for compelling images—and, wow, he finds them. He writes:
Initially, I was attracted to the noisy amateur aesthetic of the raw images. Street Views evoked an urgency I felt was present in earlier street photography. With its supposedly neutral gaze, the Street View photography had a spontaneous quality unspoiled by the sensitivities or agendas of a human photographer. It was tempting to see the images as a neutral and privileged representation of reality—as though the Street Views, wrenched from any social context other than geospatial contiguity, were able to perform true docu-photography, capturing fragments of reality stripped of all cultural intentions.
!!!
Do check out his images if you haven’t seen them already; they’re really stunning. And equally stunning, for me, is the image of Rafman at a computer, clicking through Google Street View—scouting, searching—a step at a time.
Google Living Stories
Matt’s take on Google Living Stories:
The lack of sizzle is evident in Howie Kurtz’s story about the project. He calls it “a new online tool that, well, isn’t exactly going to revolutionize journalism.” I think NYT digital CEO Martin Nisenholtz gets it about right in the Times story about the initiative: “In it,” he says, “you can see the germ of something quite interesting.”
I don’t think the fact that it’s still only a “germ” at this point diminishes the thought or work that’s gone into these efforts. We really haven’t built anything quite like this before. Inventing the future takes time! And I suspect the first time many people laid eyes on Wikipedia, their reaction was much the same: Some fancy encyclopedia you got here. Um, there’s a typo on the “List of Goonies characters” page.
In Eric Schmidt’s 2015, the web is very, very fast
Via Rex, here’s Eric Schmidt’s vision of news in 2015:
It’s the year 2015. The compact device in my hand delivers me the world, one news story at a time. I flip through my favorite papers and magazines, the images as crisp as in print, without a maddening wait for each page to load.
Even better, the device knows who I am, what I like, and what I have already read. So while I get all the news and comment, I also see stories tailored for my interests.
Two things: first, I just rewatched EPIC 2015 the other day and it’s still fun (and Matt’s narration is still, well, epic); second, the relative tameness of this vision means there are still big opportunities for other players to reinvent news—to participate in that reinvention. This is not gonna be Google’s game.
There is one thing worth noting in this op-ed. You’ll notice Schmidt hits the “magazine-like” metaphor several times. This is an idea you’re hearing a lot from GOOG lately. To paraphrase: You don’t have to wait for the pages of a magazine to load, right? Well, the web should be like that. When you click a link, or swipe your screen, the next page should simply be there.
Now, this vision of a zero–load-time web is actually pretty interesting. But is it truly transformational—the way, say, always-on broadband was transformational? I don’t know. What do you think?
Nicholson Baker can blog here anytime
I absolutely love the voice Nicholson Baker uses in his review of Ken Auletta’s new book, Googled. For instance:
One unnamed “prominent media executive” leaned toward Auletta at the 2007 Google Zeitgeist Conference and whispered a rhetorical question in his ear: What real value, he wanted to know, was Google producing for society?
Wait. What real value? Come now, my prominent executive friend. Have you not glanced at Street View in Google Maps? Have you not relied on the humble aid of the search-box calculator, or checked out Google’s movie showtimes, or marveled at the quick-and-dirtiness of Google Translate? Have you not made interesting recherché 19th-century discoveries in Google Books? Or played with the amazing expando-charts in Google Finance? Have you not designed a strange tall house in Google SketchUp, and did you not make a sudden cry of awed delight the first time you saw the planet begin to turn and loom closer in Google Earth? Are you not signed up for automatic Google News alerts on several topics? I would be very surprised if you are not signed up for a Google alert or two.
“I would be very surprised if you are not signed up for a Google alert or two.” He sneaks it in, and it’s so cutting, but not without a wink. Snark at its best and most palatable. Then, there’s this:
Surely no other software company has built a cluster of products that are anywhere near as cleverly engineered, as quick-loading and as fun to fiddle with, as Google has, all for free. Have you not searched?
“Have you not searched?” I don’t know—maybe it’s the residual tryptophan in my brain mixing with the second cup of coffee and anything would seem delightful at this moment—but I really think that, in terms of language and logic alike, Nicholson Baker hits this one spot-on.
And it’s notable because so many of the spot-on assessments of new media, culture and technology have come, lately, from Nicholson Baker. Nicholson Baker on Wikipedia. Nicholson Baker on the Kindle. He’s neither a booster nor a troll; he seems to approach it all with curiosity—the curiosity of an actual user, no small thing—and amusement. And he’s always surprising. This is Nicholson Baker, the guy who wrote about “the assault on paper.” And he’s “fond of Google”? Why, sure. He’s a thinker, not a pundit; a working brain, not a billboard hawking the same idea, over and over.
Seems to me Nicholson Baker might be a bookfuturist, whether he knows it or not.
See also: The Nicholson Baker Tapes.
(Via @tgoetz.)
Google Books and the two Dans
Wrote a post for The Millions (do you guys read The Millions? Neat book blog) about the two species of book scanner at the D is for Digitize conference here in New York. Complete with multimedia!