Part 11 (1/2)

No cable or satellite or telephone system will pay a hefty price for a network series that appears for free on YouTube-or is available in a pirated version. Because Viacom took the extreme (and arguably foolish) position of suing them, Google and YouTube have made considerable progress in coming up with a better (if probably still porous) defense against piracy. And as Google acknowledged in the negotiations-and in its settlements with the AP and the book publis.h.i.+ng industry-it has accepted the principle of paying for content. Whether piracy safeguards or deals with YouTube can spare traditional television from further slippage is doubtful. Ultimately, the fate of traditional media is to jump off a bridge without knowing whether there is a net below.

The Hollywood studios have their own concerns about piracy. The biggest box office movie of 2008, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight, was illegally downloaded around the world more than seven million times, according to the New was illegally downloaded around the world more than seven million times, according to the New York Times. York Times. The Motion Picture a.s.sociation of America claims that illegal downloads and streaming of movies in 2008 accounted for 40 percent of the industry's revenue loss due to piracy. The audience for illegal downloads of The Motion Picture a.s.sociation of America claims that illegal downloads and streaming of movies in 2008 accounted for 40 percent of the industry's revenue loss due to piracy. The audience for illegal downloads of Heroes, Heroes, a studio-produced NBC series, was equal to one-quarter of the ten million viewers who watch it each week on NBC. In their efforts to stamp out piracy, the studios often offend their customers. Sergey Brin described going on a boat in Europe on his honeymoon and watching a DVD he and his wife had purchased. ”We didn't finish. So we took it with us, and of course it wouldn't work in other DVD players.” The more he talked, the more exercised he got. He recalled the time he purchased a studio-produced NBC series, was equal to one-quarter of the ten million viewers who watch it each week on NBC. In their efforts to stamp out piracy, the studios often offend their customers. Sergey Brin described going on a boat in Europe on his honeymoon and watching a DVD he and his wife had purchased. ”We didn't finish. So we took it with us, and of course it wouldn't work in other DVD players.” The more he talked, the more exercised he got. He recalled the time he purchased The Transformers, The Transformers, hoping to watch this science fiction movie in high definition on his new Blu-ray player. But his copy wasn't compatible with Blu-ray. ”For a variety of reasons and some kind of piracy paranoia, they make it really hard on you.... I kind of feel the studios get in their own way.” hoping to watch this science fiction movie in high definition on his new Blu-ray player. But his copy wasn't compatible with Blu-ray. ”For a variety of reasons and some kind of piracy paranoia, they make it really hard on you.... I kind of feel the studios get in their own way.”

Squaring the piracy concerns of studio executives with customers' urge for convenience has thus far eluded a solution. The movie business may be glamorous, but the profit margins are tight. For decades, selling movies to television proved to be richly rewarding, as did VCR and then DVD sales and rentals. Now the revenues from all of these are declining. Downloading movies over the Internet could be the next profitable platform-if piracy can be solved, and if the Hollywood studios were not immobilized by fear of offending big retailers, such as Wal-Mart, which sells their DVDs, and instead partnered to sell their own movies directly.

The cable business is more robust. Unlike broadcasters, cable programming chanels like ESPN or MTV that produce content are not dependent on ma.s.s audiences because they enjoy two revenue streams, advertising and license fees from cable systems. Cable system owners like Comcast or Time Warner that own the cable wire and distribute content over cable systems also derive revenue streams from both ads and monthly service charges. Digital cable also has this advantage over broadcasting: it is able to offer interactive features like video on demand. Cable networks and online advertising are the only two of the seven media groupings projected to gain ad revenues in 2009, according to media consultant Jack Myers. However, like broadcasters, cable systems are dogged by the proliferation of platforms-YouTube, Mys.p.a.ce, CNET, Verizon's FIOS, local stations, two satellite television providers-that weaken their power as gatekeepers.

By 2009, with cable networks and broadcasters distributing programs for free to various online platforms, giant cable system owners like Comcast and Time Warner were concerned that their programming was being devalued. So they initiated efforts to offer online access to all of their programs, but only to their cable subscribers. The hope was that if cable subscribers could summon any program they wanted when they wanted it, they'd have less reason to fret about YouTube or Hulu, and might lure new cable subscribers. Currently, cable system owners pay much of the thirty billion dollars in license fees collected annually by the cable networks that produce programs. The club cable system owners wielded to prevent the ESPNs from putting their programs online was a warning that they would not continue to pay these steep license fees for programs cable channels were giving away cheaply or for free.

But the cable programmers may hold their own club in the form of new technologies that could replace cable set-top boxes with wirelessly received signals that will allow users to integrate all devices-from streaming video to computers to TV sets to portable devices. In early 2009, Eric Schmidt saw a demonstration of one such sleek wireless box made by the Sezmi Corporation and came away thinking that this new technology posed an imminent danger to both cable and satellite TV systems. If the wireless system worked, the cable or statellite wire could become a superfluous middleman. Sezmi was planning to beta test its system that year and claims that it had already negotiated deals with cable and broadcast networks. TV manufacturers like Sony and Samsung are developing sets with Internet connections, allowing them to bypa.s.s the cable gatekeeper.

The cable system owners already lacked leverage over broadcast networks because they do not pay to air the programs of CBS, NBC, ABC, and Fox, all of which were pus.h.i.+ng their own online strategies. If people could watch 24 on Hulu, its value to cable would be diminished. By placing their programs on a variety of online outlets-Hulu, TY.com, YouTube, Boxee-broadcasters also ran the risk of sabotaging their business. But if they didn't, they ran the risk of pa.s.sively watching their business erode. Again, the Innovator's Dilemma. Innovator's Dilemma.

A major challenge confronting the cable and telephone and other distribution companies is to demonstrate that they are not just a pipe that others use to transport their valuable content for a bargain price. Verizon's Seidenberg wants to position the phone company as a disrupter. ”We can go directly to Procter and Gamble and they can reach you without having to go through Google. So the world will now move in a direction where distribution will have a more important role.” Verizon was experimenting in late 2008 by distributing Prince's music ”directly to customers without going through a middleman”: the music companies. ”We can talk directly to directors and creators of content.”

Seidenberg, who began his career as a telephone lineman, was seated in a corner booth at the Regency Hotel, which is a New York power breakfast spot, and he grew bl.u.s.tery as he talked of what Verizon could do to middlemen. ”We're going to change ten percent of every relations.h.i.+p. In some cases, fifty percent. So will there be a need for media buyers? Maybe one!” He laughed. Because Verizon will own a wealth of data, he envisioned working directly with advertisers to better target customers. The telephone companies have a technology known as deep packet inspection (DPI) that both protects their pipes from security threats and exposes the web browsing activities of consumers to the kind of controversial behavioral advertising practiced by Phorm in England.

”It could be the broadcast networks” that Verizon siphons ad dollars from, Seidenberg said. ”It could be the cable networks. It could be a lot of people.” Seidenberg's words, however, b.u.mp against reality. Having existed for so long as quasimonopolies, the phone companies and cable companies may not be agile and daring enough to move with the speed required. It sounds hubristic for Seidenberg to a.s.sume, for instance, that a company like Verizon, with minimal experience working with Hollywood directors or advertisers, could overnight develop the skills to work with actors and directors, or with Procter & Gamble. And Seidenberg blithely minimizes the volatile issue of privacy.

Irwin Gotlieb also dismisses anxiety about privacy. He is more focused on the ability of digital technology to generate more data, which will mean that ”the value of data will escalate dramatically.” The critical questions to Gotlieb will be: ”Who collects the data? Who owns the data? Who gets to exploit the data? Who's the gatekeeper? Who's the toll collector? These are key strategic issues that need to be resolved”-between the ad agencies and Google and the cable and telephone companies, among others. But the data will be crucial because it will allow advertisers to move from guessing about ”multiple correlations”-income, demographics, television programs watched-to ”intent,” which he described this way: ”Today, if I decide I need to sell a high-end watch, who's the prospect? I can identify people with discretionary income. I can identify males or females fifty or older. But down the road, I will know you're a watch collector because I will have that data on you. How? I will know your purchase behavior. A lot of retailers have loyalty programs, and they will share this information. If consumers have searched on Google or eBay to look at watches, all these searches are data trails. So instead of a.s.suming that because you're wealthy you might buy a watch, I can narrow my target to the small percentage of watch collectors.” And mobile phones offer still more data. Whether the mining of this data will provoke a public outcry is an issue Gotlieb does not stress.

To make the sale, he believes awareness, or brand advertising, will remain vital. He has a stake in saying this, but he seems to believe it: ”I am not a proponent of the belief that most advertising is wasted. If I don't create a predilection in you for a Mercedes when you're a fifteen-year-old male, you're not going to buy a Mercedes when you're forty and can afford to. Take disposable diapers. Should you just market to pregnant women? I would argue that maybe the grandmother has significant influence. And maybe you could make little diapers for Barbies, so the eight-year-old girl becomes aware of your brand. Both of these require you to substantially expand your target.” And expand the money clients spend on advertising. It also a.s.sumes that the public will accept such hard sells.

Gotlieb believes only the agencies possess the skills and experience to engage in such long-term brand building. He refers to his work not as media buying but as ”media investment management.” Whatever name he chooses, it's endangered, which Gotlieb reluctantly admits. ”I'm terribly concerned about getting disintermediated.” It's why he thinks his business has to change from middleman to a princ.i.p.al. ”I've grown up in a business where the media agency was a pure service business. I was taught from day one to put my clients' interests ahead of my own. It may have been appropriate for the time and place. But it is no longer appropriate today, because we're competing with people who are both vendor and client, as well as agent. Microsoft is a vendor, but owns a digital ad agency. Google is a vendor, but deals directly with clients. As a consequence, unless you're terribly naive, we have to morph our business from pure service to a mix of service and nonservice.” He ticked off several options, including producing and owning content, whether it be television programs or movies; investing in technologies, as his parent company has, to try to capture more data and receive not just fees and commissions but ”partic.i.p.ate in the profits.”

What if a client asks whose interests come first, Gotlieb's or the clients? ”That's a really good question,” he responded. ”But how many people ask Google that question? If we remain purely a service business, we won't be in business.”

Advertising will look very different in coming years. New digital middlemen have already surfaced. Like Google's AdSense, these advertising networks act as brokers, putting Web sites and advertisers together. Computerized ad networks can quickly cobble together Web sites or TV stations that, together, reach an audience the size of an ESPN but at a fraction of the cost. This is a threat not just to traditional media, but to middlemen like Gotlieb. Still another refinement among agencies like Gotlieb's is that, increasingly, the media buyers are beginning to offer to create ads as well. Because the giant media-buying firms operate under the same corporate umbrella as the creative agencies, this could produce civil war within firms.

Gotlieb knows that if he doesn't refine his business model, Google or someone else may grab his clients. Most media (and not a few other industries) are in a race to avoid becoming superfluous middlemen. No matter how much popcorn they sell, movie theaters might face this fate when Hollywood begins to release movie DVDs simultaneously with the theatrical release. It is the danger faced by local TV stations as broadcast networks air their programs online and threaten to sell them directly to cable, and by media buyers like Gotlieb as clients work directly with Google or perhaps Verizon. The Internet and digital technology allows people to download movies rather than buy a DVD, to bypa.s.s stores and travel agents and perhaps eliminate financial or real estate brokers, publishers, bookstores, agents, music CDs, newspapers, cable or telephone wires, paid cla.s.sifieds, packaged software and games, car salesmen, the post office. The Web allows sellers and buyers to connect directly, as they have done on eBay. Inevitably, new technologies will cripple many old media businesses.

One day when I was questioning Eric Schmidt about the travails of old media, he calmly asked, ”Do you feel bad that the pager business is in trouble? No, because you use your cell phone as a subst.i.tute. When you have a good subst.i.tute, it's very, very hard to fight against that.” Unless old media companies want to fight their customers, try to deny their desire for new choices and new conveniences, they have no alternative but to figure out how to ride the wave.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

Where Is the Wave Taking Google?

Google is surfing a huge wave that seems not to have crested. Eileen Naughton is the director of media platforms for Google and works out of its block-long New York office on West Fifteenth Street. Before joining Google, Naughton spent more than fifteen years at Time Warner, where she held a number of senior positions, including president of Time Time magazine and vice president of investor relations during the merger of AOL and Time Warner, when everyone feared layoffs, turf battles, a stock price drop, and senior management at the joined companies vied to mirror the Ottoman Empire, where the wives of sultans poisoned stepsons. When asked to describe the difference between working at Google and at an old media company, Naughton offered a one-word reply: ”Optimism.” magazine and vice president of investor relations during the merger of AOL and Time Warner, when everyone feared layoffs, turf battles, a stock price drop, and senior management at the joined companies vied to mirror the Ottoman Empire, where the wives of sultans poisoned stepsons. When asked to describe the difference between working at Google and at an old media company, Naughton offered a one-word reply: ”Optimism.”

Google may not have an overarching strategy, but it does aim to be a disrupter. Google has always been guided by a vision enunciated as early as 2002, as we've also seen, when Larry Page told a Stanford cla.s.s, ”If you can solve search, that means you can answer any question. Which means you can do basically anything.”

When Google defines its informational mission so broadly, and enters businesses where engineering can eradicate inefficiencies, it is left with a shooting gallery of swollen targets. An ”innovative” company like Google, said Brin, enters fields where ”we scale,” meaning where they have the infrastructure to enter fairly cheaply and without huge diversions of resources. With millions of computers and servers processing searches and collecting and digesting data, this architecture makes it possible for Google to ”scale” into cloud computing, to store and search and sell digital books, to host the fifteen hours of video uploaded each minute on You Tube-the equivalent, Brin said, of uploading eighty-six thousand full length movies every week. ”Everything Google does extends its reach,” Bala Iyer and Thomas H. Davenport wrote in the Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business Review. ”It is informational kudzu.” And although Google likes to say they don't compete with media companies and prefers to call them ”partners,” Iyer and Davenport write that by working with advertisers and newspapers, magazines, television, radio, mobile telephones and Web sites, it ”is quite possible that what Google learns across various media as it solves problems for the ecosystem partners may position it to become the compet.i.tor that it now claims not to be.” ”It is informational kudzu.” And although Google likes to say they don't compete with media companies and prefers to call them ”partners,” Iyer and Davenport write that by working with advertisers and newspapers, magazines, television, radio, mobile telephones and Web sites, it ”is quite possible that what Google learns across various media as it solves problems for the ecosystem partners may position it to become the compet.i.tor that it now claims not to be.”

Google appears to be well positioned for the foreseeable future, but it is worth remembering that few companies maintain their dominance. At one point, few thought the Big Three auto companies would ever falter-or the three television networks or AT&T, IBM, or AOL. For companies with histories of serious missteps-Apple, IBM-it was difficult to imagine that they'd rebound, until they did. To avoid the roller coaster, Google has to avoid two sets of obstacles, one external, the other internal.

THE EXTERNAL HURDLES START with Microsoft, but they don't end there. Because Google has been so audacious, it has ”waked up the bears,” colliding with various industries and companies. Alert to Google's growing dominance, Verizon in late 2008 chose Microsoft's search engine for its mobile phones. Newspapers and magazines now want Google to pay to link to their stories. Television and movies seek license fees from YouTube. Telephone companies fear Google's Android. Advertising agencies seesaw back and forth between wariness and hostility. Cable and telephone broadband providers are angry about Google's call for an ”open net.” Rupert Murdoch is unhappy that Google is likely to end its lucrative advertising guarantee to his Mys.p.a.ce when the contract expires in 2010, as Time Warner was when Google announced in early 2009 that it would sell its 5 percent stake in AOL, cheapening the value of AOL and of Time Warner's stock. Microsoft needs no reminders that Google is their enemy and was reminded of this in July 2009 when Google announced-as Netscape, to Microsoft's chagrin and alarm, did a decade earlier-that it was retooling its browser to become an operating system for PCs, one without boot-up delays and that would be simpler and faster and cheaper than Windows. (Of course, Microsoft countered with a Web-based version of its Office software that is also free.) Overseas, Google is challenged. Its social network site, Orkut, has seen its market share slip in countries like India and Brazil, where it was once dominant. Even in search, there has been slippage; in Russia, a private start-up named Yandex has a market share approaching 50 percent, well ahead of Google. As with nations, there are few permanent allies. Friends like Apple are angry about Android, and although Jeff Bezos was an original Google investor (and declines to say if he still owns Google stock), Amazon is mounting a cloud-computing challenge as Google is mounting an electronic book challenge. ”These companies air kiss each other, just as any Hollywood company does,” observed Andrew Lack, the former president of NBC and the CEO of Sony Music, now the CEO of the multimedia division of Bloomberg LP. ”So their level of sincerity is not much different than the traditional Hollywood. Usually we think of Hollywood and Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., as company towns. Ironically, Silicon Valley is often right there with them.”

Google knows that one day its cold war with Facebook could turn hot. By March 2009, Facebook had 200 million users, double the number it had when Sheryl Sandberg joined a year earlier. Sandberg projected that by the end of the year, Facebook would have 1,200 employees. Despite sneers that Facebook makes no money, Sandberg said if her company extracted the money it reinvests in its computerized infrastructure, ”we've been profitable for seven quarters.” (Of course, one can't extract these core business expense.) By the fall of 2009, she predicted that Facebook would take in more cash than it expends. Asked whether Facebook was a threat, Bill Campbell replied without hesitating, ”Anybody that gets a widely accepted user platform is to be worried about.They could be the start page for people that use the Web.” The Google model is based on getting users out of Google and to other sites, on maintaining the Internet as the primary platform. Facebook and other social networks seek to keep users on their sites, to become the hub of their online lives, to become their home.

Social networks might pose a threat to Google search. At the MIT Media Lab in the winter of 2009, a Ph.D. student named Kwan Lee was devising a mobile phone application for a social network search function. Lee began with the premise that ”Ads on the side are not useful to me.” Google search, he said, ”is a pull model,” in which the search program aggregates data and lets users decide what is useful. Lee thinks it is difficult for users to ”pull” the data they want from the hundreds of thousands of links received in response to a single search query, much of which he considers spam. As a subst.i.tute, he is devising a ”push” model with which friends who are part of a social network could push tips to friends, sharing what they purchased. It would also allow partic.i.p.ants to ask questions of friends, who are likely to deliver more precise and trusted answers. ”This makes search much more efficient,” said Lee, fondling his iPhone in his s.p.a.ce on the fourth floor of the Lab. ”My goal is to reduce and eliminate spam,” to allow ”people to get recommendations from friends.”

This could pose a threat to Google, for although it has a broader base of data, social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Ning, or Linkedin retain more in-depth information about individuals and their community of friends. A familiar brand name like Amazon could also pose a challenge. ”What happens if people searching for a product go right to Amazon and not to Google?” asked an important Google adviser.

Google's founders are acutely aware that search is still fairly primitive. Type into your Google search box ”Was Shakespeare real?” and in less than a second up pop 5,06,000 results. Because many books have been written exploring whether someone other than William Shakespeare penned his plays, one result would not be possible or even desirable. But 5 million? Page and Brin often say that their ideal is to have so much information about their users that Google can devise an algorithm that provides a single perfect answer.

Kwan Lee is not alone in thinking that Google is mistaken to treat search as an engineering problem. John Borthwick, who created one of the first city Web sites, sold it to AOL in 1997, and later became senior vice president of technology and alliances for Time Warner, thinks Google ”lacks a social gene.” (Borthwick has since founded and now runs Betaworks, which seeds money for social media.) Information, he said, ”needs a social context. You need to incorporate the social graph [the connections among people] into search. Twitter becomes a platform for search. People put out Tweets-'I'm thinking about buying a camera. What does anyone think of this camera?'” It's the wisdom of crowds-your crowd of friends. ”Google is just focused on CPU-central processing computers-and ignores the processing of the human brain.” He believes this makes its search vulnerable. Google obviously has come to share this concern for a senior Google executive confirms that they tried-and failed-to acquire Twitter.

Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan identifies another variation of this threat. ”If I were Google I'd be worried about vertical searches,” he said-searches that tap the knowledge of experts. Jason Calacanis, a Web entrepreneur, started a niche search engine, Danny Sullivan identifies another variation of this threat. ”If I were Google I'd be worried about vertical searches,” he said-searches that tap the knowledge of experts. Jason Calacanis, a Web entrepreneur, started a niche search engine, Mahalo.com. The problem with horizontal search, Calacanis said, is that it spews out too much information and a.s.sumes that the most linked sites are best. ”The 'wisdom of crowds' is great to find trends,” but there is such a ”mob” of voices on the Web that search results produce too much useless information. He said he raised twenty million dollars to hire experts who produce targeted sets of no more than seven results-the seven best hotels in Paris, for instance. He hoped experts in various fields could produce answers to twenty-five thousand questions and computerize these. He vowed not to a.s.sign cookies to track a user's past searches, and said he'd be content in ten years if Mahalo had ten percent of all search traffic. He saw Google more as a partner than a compet.i.tor; the AdSense program generates a good deal of his site's income. The compet.i.tion he worried about is from old media. ”I would have been afraid if the New York Times New York Times or Bloomberg took a bunch of editors to compete with us.” Calacanis still can't understand why they didn't enter vertical search themselves. With experts in food, wine, movies, art, Iraq, finance-you name it-big newspapers might have been a search contender. or Bloomberg took a bunch of editors to compete with us.” Calacanis still can't understand why they didn't enter vertical search themselves. With experts in food, wine, movies, art, Iraq, finance-you name it-big newspapers might have been a search contender.

Of course, Calacanis himself might not be a contender. Perhaps a challenge will come from Wolfram Alpha, which was launched in May 2009 and does not search the Web or rely on experts but instead relies on databases to provide answers and offers additional links on the side of the search results. Unlike Google, these vertical search engines do not offer a universal search, which raises this question: how does a user antic.i.p.ate which subjects are covered in the vertical search index? To date, with exceptions such as Expedia .com for travel, Monster.com for job searches, and for job searches, and HomeAway.com for vacation retreats, vertical searches have not thrived. And as Google moves toward better comprehension of the information users seek, it too will produce fewer and better-honed results. Google will have compet.i.tion from Microsoft's renamed and reengineered search engine, Bing, launched in May 2009, which in July 2009 finally succeeded in merging with Yahoo search. for vacation retreats, vertical searches have not thrived. And as Google moves toward better comprehension of the information users seek, it too will produce fewer and better-honed results. Google will have compet.i.tion from Microsoft's renamed and reengineered search engine, Bing, launched in May 2009, which in July 2009 finally succeeded in merging with Yahoo search.

One could argue that the ultimate vertical search would be provided by Artificial Intelligence (AI), computers that could infer what users actually sought. This has always been an obsession of Google's founders, and they have recruited engineers who specialize in AI. The term is sometimes used synonymously with another, ”the semantic Web,” which has long been championed by Tim Berners-Lee. This vision appears to be a long way from becoming real. Craig Silverstein, Google employee number 1, said a thinking machine is probably ”hundreds of years away” Marc Andreessen suggests that it is a pipe dream. ”We are no closer to a computer that thinks like a person than we were fifty years ago,” he said.

Sometimes lost in the excitement over the wonders of ever more relevant search is the potential social cost. In his provocative book The Big Switch, The Big Switch, Nicholas Carr notes that Google's goal is to store 100 percent of each individual's data, what Google calls ”transparent personalization.” This would allow Google to ”choose which information to show you,” reducing inefficiencies. ”A company run by mathematicians and engineers, Google seems oblivious to the possible social costs of transparent personalization,” Carr wrote. ”They impose h.o.m.ogeneity on the Internet's wild heterogeneity. As the tools and algorithms become more sophisticated and our online profiles more refined, the Internet will act increasingly as an incredibly sensitive feedback loop, constantly playing back to us, in amplified form, our existing preferences.” We will narrow our frames of reference, become more polarized in our views, gravitate toward those whose opinions we share, and maybe be less willing to compromise because, he said, the narrow information we receive will magnify our differences, making it harder to reach agreement. Carr also expressed concern that search extracts another toll. ”The common term 'surfing the Web' perfectly captures the essential superficiality of our relations.h.i.+p with the information we find in such great quant.i.ties on the Internet.... The most revolutionary consequence of the expansion of the Internet's power, scope, and usefulness may not be that computers will start to think like us but that we will come to think like computers. Our consciousness will thin out, flatten, as our minds are trained, link by link, to 'DO THIS with what you find HERE and go THERE with the result.' The artificial intelligence we're creating may turn out to be our own.” Nicholas Carr notes that Google's goal is to store 100 percent of each individual's data, what Google calls ”transparent personalization.” This would allow Google to ”choose which information to show you,” reducing inefficiencies. ”A company run by mathematicians and engineers, Google seems oblivious to the possible social costs of transparent personalization,” Carr wrote. ”They impose h.o.m.ogeneity on the Internet's wild heterogeneity. As the tools and algorithms become more sophisticated and our online profiles more refined, the Internet will act increasingly as an incredibly sensitive feedback loop, constantly playing back to us, in amplified form, our existing preferences.” We will narrow our frames of reference, become more polarized in our views, gravitate toward those whose opinions we share, and maybe be less willing to compromise because, he said, the narrow information we receive will magnify our differences, making it harder to reach agreement. Carr also expressed concern that search extracts another toll. ”The common term 'surfing the Web' perfectly captures the essential superficiality of our relations.h.i.+p with the information we find in such great quant.i.ties on the Internet.... The most revolutionary consequence of the expansion of the Internet's power, scope, and usefulness may not be that computers will start to think like us but that we will come to think like computers. Our consciousness will thin out, flatten, as our minds are trained, link by link, to 'DO THIS with what you find HERE and go THERE with the result.' The artificial intelligence we're creating may turn out to be our own.”

The fear was that Google and its online brethren shortened attention spans and trivialized ideas by simplifying them. This was the thrust a quarter century ago of Neil Postman's influential book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. Amusing Ourselves to Death. He was writing of the public harm when television supplanted print. I can't suppress a smile when I think how this communications scholar, were he still alive, would react to the Internet, to the thousands and sometimes millions of answers Google offers to a search question, or to an online text-messaging tool like Twitter, with its insistence that no communication be more than 140 characters. He was writing of the public harm when television supplanted print. I can't suppress a smile when I think how this communications scholar, were he still alive, would react to the Internet, to the thousands and sometimes millions of answers Google offers to a search question, or to an online text-messaging tool like Twitter, with its insistence that no communication be more than 140 characters.