“

That is, our consumption, especially of information, is a mode of production. The general intellect is the sum of all that information circulation.

Google, then, is the reification of the general intellect. It manages to take human curiosity and turn it into capital.

The consequences of that are profound. Our curiosity is no longer a sign of our leisure; it’s an enormously important economic factor. To a degree this has always been true. Our willingness to pay attention to things is at the root of consumer demand. But it is now far more productive of informational goods in and of itself, thanks to ubiquitous online surveillance and data-storage capabilities. Much of the way we express our human curiosity can now be recorded and fed into algorithms and plotted on graphs of connections to generate more information, stimulate more curiosity, produce more demand. That’s why, as Gibson points out, Google’s Eric Schmidt claimed that people “want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.” Google doesn’t end lines of inquiry; it gives users momentum. The point of Google is to try to keep you Googling.

”

From “Google and the Production of Curiosity”

Notes

  1. parmodule reblogged this from modernandmaterialthings
  2. amirrorforone reblogged this from modernandmaterialthings
  3. imrinst reblogged this from notational and added:
    Chuckles only a creature of the spectacle would believe the delusion that “our consumption, especially of information,...
  4. humor-of-the-situation reblogged this from modernandmaterialthings
  5. notational reblogged this from georgevaldes
  6. georgevaldes reblogged this from modernandmaterialthings
  7. fotzepolitic said: Fascinating but chilling. I need to forward this one to all the librarians I know.
  8. modernandmaterialthings posted this