By Barbara Cassin
    Le Nouvel Observateur

    Week of Thursday 08 February 2007

A philosopher questions the mission the American search engine has set for itself: to "organize all the information in the world."

    Missions

    Google is the best-performing search engine on the Web: the one an overwhelming majority of Internet users use. Although one must not confuse - as Google sometimes encourages us to do - Google (a private American corporation) and the Internet (the network that connects the entire globe), Google is a good indicator of the Net. It can help us to understand what's happening since the overthrow of the "Gutenberg paradigm." We still have very little perspective: France was only linked to the Internet in 1988; Google's stock has been listed on the market since 2004.

    I have tried to stand back to assess the situation with my philosopher's tools. I wanted to understand what I did when I used Google. And then, there is always a trigger mechanism. I was at a colloquium - it was at the time of the polemic launched by Jean-Noël Jeanneney, "When Google defies Europe" - where I heard the representative from Google-Europe proclaim with unshakable confidence: "Our mission is to organize all the information in the world." This profession of missionary faith frightened me.

    Google has two mottos: "organize all the world's information" and "don't be evil." Their conjunction, a universal mission and a struggle against evil, reminds one of the "monumental fight of Good against Evil" at the base of Bush's behavior. In both cases, people proclaim that promoting democracy is the issue. To make information accessible free is not the same as sending soldiers to Iraq. But the analogy consists of deploying economic and commercial interests under the cover of a civilizing mission - passing off politics as morality.

    Cultural Democracy?

    Google provides free access to a maximum of pertinent information: let us repeat; it's a brilliant tool. But I refuse to say that it is, as it claims to be, the "champion for cultural democracy." Otherwise, we need to downgrade both democracy and culture. What it itself calls the "democracy of clicks" (basically, "one click, one vote" for an ad and "one link, one vote" for a result) has nothing to do with democracy. The simple reason is that there is no political dimension there. Clicking is not voting; one does not construct common world(s) with clicks. It's the same thing for culture: information, even reliable information, is not culture; it's barely information worthy of being described as structured. It lacks what Hannah Arendt called the dimension of a "work." Incidentally, she thought that these two terms were linked - that taste is a political faculty.

    I don't believe that Google is the first to be mistaken about "cultural democracy." Since the Greeks, people have been tearing themselves to pieces over this subject. I understand Plato saying of the Sophists that they were champions of a cultural democracy without democracy and without culture: all the more "Google" in that they earned money for it. But that's pure Plato, since for me, as for Hegel, the Sophists are rather "Greece's school masters;" masters of politics, masters of education. They established the dimension of politics through confrontation of speech; through contradiction, they helped choose the best. That said, the very expression "cultural democracy" is not obvious; it's a conflation of two spheres that can be formidable when politics under the cover of democracy revolutionizes culture.

    A "Universal" Language?

    To "Google," one must type in one or several keywords that launch a search. We must speak a keywords idiom to access the information. For the information itself is transformed into a collection of occurrences and is accessible thanks to indexes. Google's universal language is a language without syntax and without style, organized according to a very academic procedure of generalized citation. Google ranks highest what is most often cited/requested. The keywords language allows quality to be fashioned from nothing but quantity.

    In addition, most of the web that is browsed, consequently of the indexed information, remains in Anglo-American. There are, as marketing requires, interfaces in most languages so that the client feels at home, but these are only "flavors," as Google calls them, spices that enhance the sole - English - dish. Finally, the pre-eminence of English is obvious from the automatic translations offered, so imperfect that they are comical.

    Is it our destiny to become "Google-dependent?" It is never healthy to depend on a single source of supply, for information as for oil. The other big search engines are less good and no less American. Hence the initiative for a European engine that is in the process of taking shape, Quaero (like Galileo faced with GPS). But that's a strategic alternative, not anything really different. I believe we must also work on another type of data structuring, or even on several other types; to seize support from what Google leaves aside: to take singular works and the differences between languages as our point of departure instead of the flux of opinion and everything-English-style; to explore the plurality of cultures per se, to structure them in a diversified way, and to induce other kinds of searches and results. In short, to invent.

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    Philosopher and philologist, Barbara Cassin is a research director at CNRS [(French) National Center for Scientific Research] and co-director of the Philosophical Order collection at the Seuil publishing house. Specialist in Greek and Sophist thought, she has, notably, directed The European Vocabulary of Philosophies and has just published Google-moi. La deuxième mission de l'Amérique [Google-me. America's second mission] with publisher Albin Michel.