Google erases common memories - and devalues collective effort

Why do the last 3 posts hark on about events from 50 years ago – let alone apparently going back over material I covered last year? Mainly because of the deep concern I’m developing about the effects google is having on our institutional memory which I first shared last year here – and here

If you’re a celebrity, you’ll find numerous references to your activities on google. If, on the other had, you’re a hard-working, innovative community activist or councillor, you’ll find just a blank – you’re erased from our collective memory. It can happen even to high-fliers - try googling the name of one of the brightest Parliamentary stars (and prolific writer) of the 1970s, John Mackintosh, who died at the tragically early age of 48 and you’ll find so little (admittedly, you have to know to put in his middle initial “P” which produces much more!)

Google rewards celebrities - and whitewashes the rest of us out of history. We deserve better – our collective efforts are important – don’t let the fatalists get to you!

In saying this, I’m aware that I appear to be one of these Jeremiahs railing against the evils of technology. I’ve been a serious blogger since 2009 – even if I succumbed to Twitter only last year and smart phone only a couple of months ago! So you can put me down in the middle somewhere – neither a techno-optimist nor enthusiast. A year or so ago I tried to articulate my feelings on this subject -

There are very few of us who dare to challenge technological change. Most of us fear the ridicule involved – being the targets of taunts of being Canutes or Luddites. It, therefore, took a lot of courage for Jerry Mander in 1978 to produce Four Arguments for the elimination of television and for Neil Postman to follow this up in 1985 with “Amusing Ourselves to Death”. And, with his “In the absence of the sacred – the failure of technology” (1992) Jerry Mander took his critique our technological society even further.

In this provocative work, Mander challenges the utopian promise of technological society and tracks its devastating impact on cultures worldwide. The Western world’s loss of a sense of the sacred in the natural world, he says, has led us toward global environmental disaster and social disorder - and worse lies ahead. Yet models for restoring our relationship with the Earth exist in the cultures of native peoples, whose values and skills have enabled them to survive centuries of invasion and exploitation.

Far from creating paradise on Earth, technology has instead produced an unsustainable contest for resources. Mander surveys the major technol.ogies shaping the “new world order”, computers, telecommunications, space exploration, genetic engineering, robotics, and the corporation itself and warns that they are merging into a global mega-technology, with dire environmental and political results

Needless to say, none of such book were taken seriously. It took perhaps a BBC television series of technological dystopia Black Mirror – which first hit screens exactly a decade ago – for us to begin to realise that technology (in the shape of the social media) has its perverse side

More recent texts

The Shallows - what the internet is doing to our brain Nicholas Carr (2010)

From Guttenberg to Zuckenberg – what you really need to know about the Internet; John Naughton (2013)

To Save everything click here – the folly of technological solutionism; Efgeni Morozov (2013)

The Internet is not the Answer; Andrew Keen (2015)

Utopia is Creepy; Nicholas Carr (2016)

Ten Arguments for Deleting your social media right now; Jaron Lanier (2018)