Wikipedia, It's So Open

I have always loved Wikipedia. Like Google, I am afraid that its usefulness just always seemed to outweigh its deficiencies. It is always the first result to appear in a Google search and once I learned that the Supreme Court was using it, I really just let go of most of my reservations. I mean if the highest court in the land is doing it, then who am I to question?

But when I went about registering as a member of Wikipedia and became fully aware of the mess I could potentially make, I realized that there were some slight differences. For one, Google is like this divine untouchable thing in the Internet world. Sure, we can all use it but for the most part its technology is off limits to us. Not so with Wikipedia. Wiki is like this lowly, more common-man thing that is fully capable of being touched, corrupted, molded, etc. It's interesting that such a trusted source is so open and as a company, Wikipedia is proud of it. What an entirely different approach to climbing the ladder to Internet greatness. While most companies relish in their own exclusive claim to a product or an idea, Wikipedia has no secret. Its intellectual property is us.

Trusting Google

Okay, so how does Google work? From what I can gather, most people think Google searches the whole Internet and then compiles all of the information based on relevancy But according to this, Google is more like a massive database that only compiles as much as it is legally allowed to and as much as it "googlebots" or its web crawlers can touch. Apparently, the genius and the danger of Google is its algorithm, its patented code, which allows it to sort its data more efficiently than any other search engine. The privacy issue that Google is always battling is central to understanding how the search giant operates. Each one of Google's media outlets (i.e. Youtube, Google Earth, Gmail) involve extracting valuable information from its users in order to provide its services. But as it compiles this information, Google is sitting on heinous information that the government would love to have access to such as details regarding child pornography, terrorism, international trade secrets...and the list goes on.

The problem for me is that I trust Google. It is naive I realize and to those paranoid, overzealous, corrupt-corporation-takes-over-the-world conspiracy theorists, I am probably offering myself up for the privacy slaughter. But for anyone who uses Google, they know that it is just too good to leave alone. Further, I think in many other ways, we all have already lost our privacy to the digital age. If someone wants your information bad enough, nowadays it does not require much to get it. The question is: how aware of it as a user are you? As Googlers we take great comfort in being relatively oblivious as to what Google actually is. I do not think it is a coincidence that Facebook is big and yet no one knows much about it; Google is even bigger and yet billions know even less about it. Someone has to write a sociological dissertation explaining why no one really cares. But juts for kicks, I hypothesize that it is because of trust. We trust that Google is the friendly and gentle emperor it seems to be that controls almost everything and shares its secrets with no one. But on the bright side, it is so good to us. So as long as it plays along with our expectations, we "trust" it not to be evil.

On a Lighter Note

Just because I thought it was hilarious....lol.

I don't mean to be a bummer...

This is not to bring anyone to tears but like my fellow blogger, zefrank, I had a similar and saddening experience only this past week . A friend of mine passed away suddenly on Monday at age 17 and within a few hours, the entire campus knew of her death. Within that same time frame, all 4oo of her Facebook friends knew about the sad news as well. As all of her friends (including me) began updating our facebook statuses to include warm reminisces ("missing you always" or "RIP *****"), it suddenly occurred to me that maybe we shouldn't be posting this on Facebook at all. I mean what if one of her relatives, who had not been told yet, was looking at the page. No one deserves to hear news like that on Facebook. What about her boyfriend? Had anyone told him yet? Messages began appearing on her wall by 11 am. We had only found out at 9am that same morning. While zefrank feels that Facebook allowed him to feel closer to his cousin and more involved in keeping her memory alive, this situation, for me, was not the same. I began asking myself whether it was thoughtful or insensitive to post such personal news online for the world to see, even among so called "friends." Granted, Facebook groups were also created posthumously in loving memory of my friend so that we all could express our sympathies and condolences. But what are the rules? What are the courtesies? Her facebook has since been taken down. But I wonder how long people would have continued to comment on her wall and what the societal implications of that are.