Nicholas Carr has a new and very thoughtful piece on the evolution of Google as a technology, and as a company. It’s a sobering short essay, argued in part with the poetry of T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost. Carr’s thesis is that “Google’s goal is no longer to read the web. It is to read us.” His point being that the company’s push to personalize searches means that the real work Google is figuring out its users, not figuring out the web. Carr doesn’t comment on the privacy issues explicit in the companies evolution, rather, he his concern is “the prison we now call personalization.”
This commentary combined with the news on Google’s tax shelters make the slogan Don’t Be Evil seem like something from a long time ago…reading Robert Frost is of course a good antidote to the news about Google and late January cold:
- Collected Poems, Prose & Plays by Robert Frost
- The Art of Robert Frost by Tim Kendall
- A Divided Poet : Robert Frost, North of Boston, and the Drama of Disappearance by David Sanders