Google and the Culture of Search

"Some say Google makes us stupid. Others say it should make us worry. Google and the Culture of Search makes us both smarter and more worried about Googles monopoly powers. As Hillis et al. show, Googles lineage runs less to General Motors than to a long line of mathematicians and metaphysicians who wanted to organize the worlds informationnever before has the strange beast of Google been so clearly put into its proper family tree. Read this book!" John Durham Peters, University of Iowa "If you wonder why Google gets billions of search queries every day, and (like me) don't think because it's free or because it's there are sufficient answers, you should read this book. Its a treasure trove of insights into the culture of search." Viktor Mayer-Schnberger, Oxford Internet Institute "Some say Google makes us stupid. Others say it should make us worry. Google and the Culture of Search makes us both smarter and more worried about Googles monopoly powers. As Hillis et al. show, Googles lineage runs less to General Motors than to a long line of mathematicians and metaphysicians who wanted to organize the worlds informationnever before has the strange beast of Google been so clearly put into its proper family tree. Read this book!" John Durham Peters, University of Iowa "If you wonder why Google gets billions of search queries every day, and (like me) don't think because it's free or because it's there are sufficient answers, you should read this book. Its a treasure trove of insights into the culture of search." Viktor Mayer-Schnberger, Oxford Internet Institute "The strength of this work lies in its copious and meticulous detail, which provides a firm basis for the authors arguments. Hillis, Petit, and Jarrett take the reader on a historical journey through the intertwined ideas of knowledge automation and the search for truth, conveying the reader through the philosophical roots of Atomism and Neo-Platonism, to pan-psychic visions of a universal library and HiveMind, and culminating at the relatively modern depictions of aWorld Brain and Universal Electronic Library." - Kelly Quinn, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA

Ken Hillis is Professor of Media and Technology Studies in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is author of Digital Sensations: Space, Identity and Embodiment in Virtual Reality (1999) and Online a Lot of the Time: Ritual, Fetish, Sign (2009). He is co-editor of Everyday eBay: Culture, Collecting and Desire (2006). Michael Petit is Director of Media Studies and the Joint Program in New Media at the University of Toronto Scarborough. He is author of Peacekeepers at War (1986) and co-editor of Everyday eBay: Culture, Collecting and Desire (2006). Kylie Jarrett is Lecturer in Multimedia at the National University of Ireland Maynooth where she is the program coordinator of the BA Digital Media.

1. Growing Up Google 2. Metaphysics of Search 3. The Searcher and the Self 4. Search Critic 5. Conclusion: "I Search, Therefore I Am"