Comments (2)Darkly Google
January 29, 2010Abe Novick
Special to the Jewish Times
The letters are like colorful playthings on Google’s home page. They look like candy. They’re shaped like toys.
But as Google grows ever more ubiquitous worldwide, and as it enters areas beyond search with its acquisition of YouTube and now mobile communications with its new Nexus One, those playful letters stand as a larger cultural marker in the world. Similar to the eroding divisions between church and state, editorial and advertising, technology has melded work and play together.
Just as there are ethical concerns to consider in the first two long-standing categorical divisions, are there ones to ponder in this latest union?
Consider first, work was usually something deemed real, play as imagined. Work was once done mainly with the hands, play with the mind.
But technology has morphed away from industries where we make real stuff to manufacturing information. With the explosion of mobile technology, the imagined and the real, the world of work and play have converged.
Wired magazine recently called the last decade “The Mobile Decade” because “people got increasingly plugged into an always-on, totally portable, always-connected existence.” Gadgetry ranged from 2001’s original iPod to 2009’s Kindle 2.
Of course, Hollywood has been creating and exporting movies and entertainment worldwide as far back as 1895. And according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, between 1986 and 2005 foreign sales of U.S. motion picture and video products rose from $1.91 billion to $10.4 billion (in 2005 dollars), a huge increase.
But today, because it’s no longer a one-way boulevard and YouTube and social media and mobile communications allow anyone and everyone to freely upload and export entertainment, that number is next to impossible to quantify.
Further, the technology used to transmit and watch movies and entertainment are the exact devices that carried protest images from Iran and more recently Haiti’s devastation and destruction .
Even the side-armed stalwart to the business traveler, the BlackBerry, attached at the hip like a road warrior’s armament, is advertised on TV with a version of The Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” — a song once signifying counter-cultural values — the antithesis of money and commerce. So the playfulness of flower power has become intimately linked to the transactions of a global economy.
Moreover, the lead business story in the last month been about NBC’s bouncing comedian/entertainer Jay Leno’s show back to 11:35 p.m. What was once a purely entertainment story has been subsumed by the business of entertainment.
All the while in the consumer’s mind, work and play collide. Ethereal celebrities become equated with the businesses they represent.
What are the existential ramifications? Is it purely a matter for the individual to make that distinction?
The philosopher Jean Baudrillard used the allegory of a map so large and detailed and laid over the territory it represents, that it becomes the real and precedes the territory. It is what he calls the “hyperreal.”
But while there’s a truth woven into the allegory, his metaphor ignores harsh facts. Critical of his take, Susan Sontag pointed out in “Regarding The Pain of Others,” “It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no real suffering in the world.”
Ultimately, while Google’s colors evoke play, the world they open us up to can be more like the one seen through a glass darkly.
Abe Novick, whose work is at abenovick.com , writes regularly for the Baltimore Jewish Times on the intersection of American and Jewish culture.