The Times:
White bread for young minds, says university professor

Google is “white bread for the mind”, and the internet is producing a generation of students who survive on a diet of unreliable information, a professor of media studies will claim this week.

My comment:

Article just started to get interesting when it ended there. Media literacy… interpretive skills – absolutely! Duh!
Could fundamentals in basic education really be so lacking? Media literacy is an incredibly important research skill and life skill as it always was – before the web, as it will be after the web. In an ideal world Google would be a great tool that revealed how many points of view there are out there, how rich perspectives and opinions and how diverse facts can be.

My main beef would be that Google (rather online search) should be a feast of delicacies rather than the meat & potatoes it serves up. It’s hard to penetrate a search result beneath big business. Google is a commercial solution to search and a market dominator. As a commercial solution they have sought to protect the algorithm (and their market position) and have created a field of specialist knowledge along with it. Far from democratic, search results are elite. Search results support the dominate view.

Scott Berkun – Is Google White Bread for Young Minds?

See what Scott had to say on the issue – he’s a great thinker. I keep track of his blog & was referred to the times article from there… spot my comment. (similar to above… )

Calling for an open web – I wonder what Al thinks of Google & if he in fact uses it at all.

 http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1622015,00.html

The idea behind this project is to use money earned from selling advertising space to Google to buy Google stock for us. Yes, us.

This organisation, Google Will Eat Itself wants to attack Google’s almighty private status and give this powerful company to the public (Google To The Public.)

Although it is currently predicted to take 202.345.125,1 years before Google finally eats itself I suspect that a rolling stone gathers more moss. And this is an idea needs momentum.

While many of us absolutely love Google, (and I still sort of do in that it is an amazing and dynamic company with a damn good product) – it is also a product that threatens to gentrify the web and raises questions about democratic media online. It is a product that infringes privacy (Gmail, search data storage) and a company that will work in cooperation with the Chinese government to sensor search results. That is just too damn powerful. (because of its ever increasing popularity) And it’s power that The Google Guys are willing to use. Recently Google Will Eat Itself was censored or blacklisted from Google search results.

Clearly you can Google for websites that criticize the company and it’s products but you can’t threaten to own it by becoming a shareholder! BLACKLIST!

The major challenge that this project will face is that it will take significant public education before the collective we realise that supporting the growth of a single point of entry to the web is a bad thing. And that it is much worse if that single point of entry is directed by two men and their side kicks.

http://www.gwei.org/index.php