robin2

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March 12, 2006

Look on my googlejuice, ye mighty, and despair

I've been reading ‘The Search: How Google and its rivals rewrote the rules of business and transformed our culture’ by John Battelle. (Next on my ‘to read’ list: ‘Laziness: why books these days need to have their content summarized in their sub-titles as otherwise we might not be sure whether they were what we really wanted’.) It is a rather gushing account of the business histories of Google, Alta Vista, Google, Yahoo, Overture and Google. That the author was a founder of ‘Wired’, and that he considered humankind's greatest ever artifact to be the Apple Macintosh (prior to its being trumped by Google Zeitgeist) probably tells you all you need to know about where he's coming from.

The book has a coda that, while it might seem rather at odds with the rest of the book in terms of content, makes sense of the author's underlying interest. It describes a spate of googling that begins with his searching on the term ‘immortality’. Realising that he is more interested in the concept of immortality than in signing up for some cryogenic scam, he follows up on one of his search hits, the ancient epic ‘Gilgamesh’. He finds an on-line copy, together with an account of how that particular version of the story came from stone tablets found at a ruined library at Ninevah; tablets that contained the name of the author.

In my search for immortality, I had found the oldest known named author in the history of Western civilization. […] Through his writings, with an assist from Google and a university professor, he had, in a sense, become immortal.

Battelle needn't have looked quite so far back for this concept. Consider:

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide and made my pains his prey.
“Vain man”, said she, “that dost in vain assay
A mortal thing so to immortalise,
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eke my name be wiped out likewise.”
“Not so,” quoth I, “let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse your virtues rare shall eternise,
And in the heavens write your glorious name.
Where whenas Death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew.”

While the sentiment in Spenser's poem is very sweet, the poet's lady is quite right. (No change there, then.) Her name isn't written in the heavens. Nor is anyone's. It it vanity to think otherwise. (At least her good sense has been eternised thus far.) But, as with the poet, Battelle cannot resist vanity's call:

What does it mean, I wondered, to become immortal through words pressed in clay—or […] through words formed in bits and transferred over the Web? It that not what every person longs for […] to die, but to be known forever? And does not search offer the same immortal imprint: is not existing forever in the indexes of Google and others the modern-day equivalent of carving our stories into stone? For anyone who has ever written his own name into a search box and anxiously awaited the results, I believe the answer is yes.

And so the story ends. Let it be known, now and forever: John woz ere.

Posted by robin2 at March 12, 2006 10:05 PM

Comments

Posted by: robin[theotherone] at March 20, 2006 05:29 AM