Class explores the good and evil of Google

It's one thing to hear Professor Todd Presner's shrewd insights into how Google is changing the world. It's another to sit in on his undergrad class, "The Googlization of Everything," and hear the surprising attitudes of his students, most of whom were born in 1990.

 

"It doesn't matter if Google is making us stupid," said one student, before giving a rationale for her alarming comment. "A hunter might say that a grocery store makes us stupid, because we no longer know how to hunt, but if the grocery store means we don't need to hunt, then it doesn't really matter. It's the same with Google. You don't know how to use an encyclopedia, but you can get the same answer online."

 

Presner, an associate professor of Germanic Languages who has won accolades and awards for digital innovation, understands why his students think such things.

 

"These are students who have always known the Internet. They have a sense that it's natural," said Presner, who even incorporated a blog into how he teaches the class. "I have one or two students in my class who think it's a great thing that privacy is being undone. They're happy to expose everything about themselves online. Maybe privacy ended around 1998. Maybe privacy is a relic of the 18th century."

 

With a room full of students who've hardly known life without search engines, cell phones and blogs, his class zeroes in on Google, possibly the biggest influence of all. The company has enormous clout despite its relative youth, Presner explained.

 

"The seminar tries to understand a company that's only 11 years old, and yet has had a massive impact on how we relate to information, how we find information — really, how we know," Presner said.

 

Google is dangerous, Presner insists. It's also miraculous. The idea isn't to think of Google in black-and-white terms, but to weigh both the benefits and the risks of Google's staggering range of products, from the original search engine to Google Maps, Google Earth, Gmail, instant messages, document-sharing, personal profile pages and more.

 

"One of the big questions is about privacy. We have no idea what data are stored, how long it's stored, what will be done with the data over the years," Presner said. "Google is extraordinary because it largely produces tools that people willingly enter information into. It's a reason to be suspicious.

 

"What happens when Google has every e-mail I've ever written over 30 years?" he continued. "Perhaps it will be used in ways I find offensive or violating."

 

On the flip side, Presner is perhaps most well-known for his work on Hypercities, which uses Google Earth software to create overlays of current-day cities with digital historical recreations. He also won a digital innovation prize, worth $238,000, from the MacArthur Foundation for his Hypermedia Berlin and was one of four faculty winners of the 2006 Brian P. Copenhaver Award for Innovation in Teaching with Technology.

 

"As much as I criticize, I find it vastly useful," Presner said. "Their goal — making all the world's information universally available — could be a very charitable thing. But it can also be read in a more skeptical light."

 

Google harvests and mines our information, sometimes in very good way, he said: Its flu-tracker, for example, notices upticks in flu-related Google searches and already outperforms the Centers for Disease Control in spotting localized outbreaks.

 

A mapping project used Google Earth to compile satellite photos of destroyed villages in Darfur, bringing emotionally powerful visual proof of the recent genocide to light, Presner said. And, of course, marketers love Google's ability to help them target their ads more profitably.

 

More ominously, Google's ubiquity also gives the company enormous control over information, Presner said. Google's proprietary search algorithms – the business secret that helped them shoot to the top – decide what information shows up on the first page of a Google search.

 

"They decide what's important and what's not," he said. "As we dig through this sea of information, some of it comes to our attention and some of it gets buried and lost. It's important to be skeptical about whether what they show us is really what's most important."

 

Google was the first to show us "Web 2.0," Presner said – the interactive, programmable web, which now includes such digital giants as Wikipedia and Facebook. With his mixed feelings for Google, it's no wonder he sees an even darker side for Facebook.

 

"Facebook has even more of our information," Presner said. "Think about all those quizzes: your favorite cereal, your movie tastes, everything. People are willing to give up so much info. It's like the perfect consumer profile.

 

"Who knows how all that information will be used?" Presner said. "I don't have an answer. It's more a fear of the unknown."