Is Google Too Powerful?
The Internet is a relatively new concept, created for the American military and for post-secondary institutions to be able to share information with each other easier and faster. The Internet however began to catch on in the public but was far too complicated and cluttered for most average civilians to use it effectively. It was with that thought that Google was born. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, two students at Stanford University in California, developed Google. Page needed a topic for his thesis and chose to delve into the World Wide Web. As he was researching and looking into his topic, he wondered if there was any way to connect pages in a link like arrangement and organize them …show more content…
With over 30 trillion web pages to go through naturally there will be bad quality content. The problem is often the bad quality outweighs the good. In a review of Andrew Whitworth’s book, Information Obesity, Stephen Thorton explains one of Whitworth’s metaphors, which perfectly explains how people perceive information today. “Whitworth argues that though access to information is no longer a problem for many, discriminating, filtering, and managing this information is becoming increasingly difficult, and many are failing to maintain critical capabilities in the face of this overwhelming diet of data. Developing this nutritional metaphor, Whitworth suggests that just as physical obesity is not simply the result of an overabundance of food but also a reduction in the quality of food, an increase in the commercial pressures to consume unhealthily, and a lack of basic cooking skills, so, ‘information obesity’ is not simply the result of the presence of too much information but also the product of a decline in the quality of that information, a rise in commercial pressures, and a dearth of basic information skills.” With so much information out there, people should know how to cultivate it but unfortunately that is often not the case. As a result, people take whatever information they see first and often do not apply any critical thinking to the material. Dependency upon Google is a reason why its increasing power is something people should view as a
The Internet is a relatively new concept, created for the American military and for post-secondary institutions to be able to share information with each other easier and faster. The Internet however began to catch on in the public but was far too complicated and cluttered for most average civilians to use it effectively. It was with that thought that Google was born. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, two students at Stanford University in California, developed Google. Page needed a topic for his thesis and chose to delve into the World Wide Web. As he was researching and looking into his topic, he wondered if there was any way to connect pages in a link like arrangement and organize them …show more content…
With over 30 trillion web pages to go through naturally there will be bad quality content. The problem is often the bad quality outweighs the good. In a review of Andrew Whitworth’s book, Information Obesity, Stephen Thorton explains one of Whitworth’s metaphors, which perfectly explains how people perceive information today. “Whitworth argues that though access to information is no longer a problem for many, discriminating, filtering, and managing this information is becoming increasingly difficult, and many are failing to maintain critical capabilities in the face of this overwhelming diet of data. Developing this nutritional metaphor, Whitworth suggests that just as physical obesity is not simply the result of an overabundance of food but also a reduction in the quality of food, an increase in the commercial pressures to consume unhealthily, and a lack of basic cooking skills, so, ‘information obesity’ is not simply the result of the presence of too much information but also the product of a decline in the quality of that information, a rise in commercial pressures, and a dearth of basic information skills.” With so much information out there, people should know how to cultivate it but unfortunately that is often not the case. As a result, people take whatever information they see first and often do not apply any critical thinking to the material. Dependency upon Google is a reason why its increasing power is something people should view as a