At 15:11 04/03/2005, Ulla Bunz wrote:
I've been reading about google hits and checking spelling and students using google for research (which I find somewhat troublesome), and I'd like to recommend EPIC to you. Check it out here: http://www.robinsloan.com/epic/
It's always difficult to predict the future, but this movie contains too many "good ol' times" bias' in my view. I like the NYT, but undoubtly Google (even though it's a quasi-monopoly) is a more "democratic" news source than any newspaper, let alone any broadcaster. Also, the NYT currently sells about 1.1 Million copies, The Sun has 3.4 Million in a country a quarter the size of the US. You figure, if the Sun is a desirable news source, which supports democratic citizenship. Need I spell another three-letter-word: FOX. The film celebrates "journalistic professionalism", although many scholars (Tuchman, Gans, Gitlin immediately spring to mind) have shown that these professional norms systematically exclude certain news sources, issues and events. Why would a search engine, which indexes a much wider variety of sources be more rather than less biased? The film also contains a number of factual errors, such as: "Google's algorithm is based on amazon's" The principle of the evaluation of links certainly preceeds amazon, and Google's principle sorting mechanism is very different from amazon's (in 1998), which then did have recommendations, but did not order search results through link evaluation and clustering techniques. "Google News is edited entirely by computers" That's a semantic trick. Google News is based on newswires and other news providers, which do have human editors. "All the news on EPIC are sensationalist". Current print/broadcast media also prefer event-centred coverage over issue-oriented coverage (see, eg., Iyangar's "Is anyone responsible"). I cannot see, why "issue-oriented reporting" should be the domain of journalists only? Au contraire, there are many citizens with particular policy interests, which offer much more thematic news than any news wire does. Unlike the press, these citizens are not so much driven by market forces, which lead journalists in the traditional mass media to "eposidic" reporting. A few words on media market concentration the movie loathes so much. In general, of course, market concentration is a bad thing for product variety (read: range of opinions in communication terms). But Google does not edit the contents (safe for a few webpaes on Google itself produces), but just indexes them quite efficiently. It provides thus the infrastructure to effiently access all sorts of news sites. I know of no goverment or open-surce project, which does it more "balanced". Just my 2c. Thomas thomas koenig, ph.d. department of social sciences, loughborough university http://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/mmethods/staff/thomas/index.html