“What is Google? What do they sell?” asks Don Norman, the author of The Design of Everyday Things and a demigod of the design world.
It’s a question that gets asked a lot, especially as the company’s power and products continue to expand. In a talk on Friday at the dConstruct conference in Brighton, England, he pointed out that –despite the complexity of the organization — the answer usually looks pretty simple.
“They have lots of people, lots of servers, they have Android, they have Google Docs, they just bought Motorola. Most people would say ‘we’re the users, and the product is advertising’,” he said. “But in fact the advertisers are the users and you are the product.”
Then he went further. “They say their goal is to gather all the knowledge in the world in one place, but really their goal is to gather all of the people in the world and sell them.”
Monthly Archives: September 2011
“Can Intervention Work?” by Rory Stewart and Gerald Knaus Can Intervention Work?
Rory Stewart and Gerald Knaus; Review by Seth Jones:
In his classic “Twenty-Seven Articles,” published in the Arab Bulletin in August 1917, the renowned British Army officer T.E. Lawrence advised beginners to use prudence when working with Arab armies. “Do not try to do too much with your own hands,” he warned. “Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them.”
It was sage advice from a seasoned warrior who traipsed around the Middle East wearing local garb, speaking several Arab dialects and living with Arab irregulars during their struggle against the Ottoman Empire. Since that time, the United States and Europe have engaged in dozens of interventions across the globe, from occupied Germany after World War II to the soft, limestone cave complexes of Afghanistan after 9/11. In some cases, as in Germany and Bosnia, these interventions have achieved impressive results. But in others, as in Somalia in the early 1990s, they have gone gravely awry.
Haven Bound A Q&A with Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jónsdóttir
In 2008, Iceland was hit hard by the global financial crisis. Citizen outrage and political unrest followed, sparking a people-powered shift in government policies. In June of 2010, the parliament passed the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI), a resolution to draft the world’s strongest free speech protections. Then, this spring, the government began crowdsourcing a new constitution online, and produced a draft in late July. Alysia Santo spoke with Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a member of parliament and a one-time WikiLeaks spokesperson, about her goals to transform Iceland into a haven for freedom of speech and transparency. A condensed version of this conversation appeared in the September/October 2011 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review.
You have said that journalists are information refugees.
In this fragile metamorphosis, where most of the media is moving on to the Internet but has not figured out how to make money, it’s all about what gets the most clicks. It’s usually not in-depth or investigative reporting. These types of reporting are very often quite expensive compared to the number of clicks it gets. We’re hoping to make Iceland into a place where if you take the chance to blow the whistle, your story is going to appear.
My driving force is bloggers in countries like China, Tibet, Sri Lanka, and others. They are risking their lives to tell us what’s really going on. I want to be able to provide them safe haven. At the very least we can make sure that their stories remain up no matter what.
How Billionaires Could Save the Country
If you think, as I’ve argued repeatedly, that we need a “radically centrist” third-party presidential candidate to shake things up, and to force both political parties to confront the myriad issues that their interest groups and ideological litmus tests bar them from treating honestly, then there are only two ways for that to happen in 2012. Like it or not, both depend on wealthy Americans investing in creative political change.
The first scenario is that the new group Americans Elect succeeds in securing ballot access in all 50 states and runs a national online nominating convention (in which every registered voter can be a delegate) next summer that will put an independent ticket on the ballot. The group tells me that it is on track to have ballot access in 27 states by the end of this year; by law, the other 23 don’t allow the relevant signature-gathering until next year.