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Google Me

One-Click Democracy
  • Barbara Cassin
  • Translated by: Michael Syrotinski and Michael Syrotinski
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2017
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About this book

“Google is a champion of cultural democracy, but without culture and without democracy.” In this witty and polemical critique the philosopher Barbara Cassin takes aim at Google and our culture of big data. Enlisting her formidable knowledge of the rhetorical tradition, Cassin demolishes the Google myth of a “good” tech company and its “democracy of clicks,” laying bare the philosophical poverty and political naiveté that underwrites its founding slogans: “Organize the world’s information,” and “Don’t be evil.” For Cassin, this conjunction of globalizing knowledge and moral imperative is frighteningly similar to the way American demagogues justify their own universalizing mission before the world.

While sensitive to the possibilities of technology and to Google’s playful appeal, Cassin shows what is lost when a narrow worship of information becomes dogma, such that research comes to mean data mining and other languages become provincial “flavors” folded into an impoverished Globish, or global English.

Author / Editor information

Contributor: Barbara Cassin Barbara Cassin has served as the Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and as the President of the College International de Philosophie. A recipient of the CNRS Gold Medal, she is a member of the Academie Francaise and an exhibit curator. Her recent books in English translation include Jacques the Sophist: Lacan, Logos, and Psychoanalysis (Fordham University Press, 2019), Google Me: One-Click Democracy (Fordham University Press, 2017), and Nostalgia: When Are We Ever at Home? (Fordham University Press, 2016). Her editorial work includes the seminal Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Princeton University Press, 2014). A translator herself (notably of Hannah Arendt and Peter Szondi), she is the editor of several book series including L’Ordre philosophique. --- Contributor: Michael Syrotinski Michael Syrotinski is Marshal Professor of French at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. He is the author of Deconstruction and the Postcolonial and cotranslator of Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables.

Reviews

First published in the age of Mission Accomplished, Google Me reads as prophetic in the age of America First. Cassin reframes our current debates about the health of democracy in a technological-neoliberal age within a broader philosophical context. Our iPhones and algorithms have not brought forth a new world, they've just added a 21st-century gloss to an ancient problem. --- A readable and entertaining, yet serious indictment of informational culture. Cassin, a philosopher and renowned scholar of ancient thought, brings a philosophical perspective to the rise of Google and its impact on a wide range of cultural activities. Her reflections give us a critical space to consider the cost of our acquiescence to the quantification of culture that lies at the heart of today’s information-driven capitalism. The result is a provocative and potentially transformative contribution to contemporary scholarship on Google and internet culture more generally.---Mark B. N. Hansen, Duke University

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    Frontmatter

    i
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    CONTENTS

    vii
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    TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

    ix
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    PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH- LANGUAGE EDITION

    xv
    Barbara Cassin
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    INTRODUCTION: WHY BE INTERESTED IN GOOGLE?

    1
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    1. THE INTERNET REVEALED THROUGH GOOGLE

    7
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    2. GOOGLE INC.: FROM SEARCH TO GLOBAL CAPITAL

    22
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    3. OUR MISSION IS TO ORGANIZE THE WORLD’S INFORMATION

    40
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    4. DON’T BE EVIL

    64
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    5. ON CULTURAL DEMOCRACY

    91
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    NOTES

    127
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    INDEX

    147
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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
July 20, 2020
eBook ISBN:
9780823278091
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823278091
eBook ISBN: 9780823278091
Keywords for this book
culture; democracy; digital library; Google; Knowledge-based Society; universalism
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