::   8 O'CLOCK TRAIN   ::

Surely this is a first :  the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis (NAAP) in 2 weeks will host a conference on Google :

Listening in the Age of Google :
Clinical Perspectives and Social Action
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Fordham University School of Social Service @ Lincoln Center Campus

Why Google?

Google more than any other resource defines the knowable world and makes it accessible to us. Because it is free, Google delivers this world to us anywhere there is internet service—by phone line, by cable, or by satellite. Because of its unconventional founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google fulfills its mission: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” We are able to search not only webpages but also the precise text within books; Google is in the midst of digitizing some of the world’s finest libraries. Because it is Google, we can

• Have free use of web-based e-mail (Gmail),
• Search for the text within books (Google Books) and scholarly articles (Google Scholar)
• Search for images and upload and share images (Picasa)
• Upload, store, and share videos and watch the video files of others (Google Video and YouTube)
• Create weblogs and voice our personal thoughts, feelings, and intellectual and creative impulses (Blogger)
• Share collaborative workspaces (Docs), participate in discussion groups (Google Groups) and social networks (Orkut)
• Organize our schedule and share events with friends (Google Calendar)
• Communicate throughout the world using Google Talk, Chat and Instant Messaging
• Translate text we wish to read or text we wish to share with others in other languages
• Use mapping software to plot trips and travel times and to show others how to reach us (Google Maps)
• Explore the world from space (Google Earth)

Google, like the World Wide Web, emerged and evolved as fast as the world wide web itself. Let’s think back just over 10 years in Google’s history:

“In September 1998, Google Inc. opened its door in Menlo Park, California. The door came with a remote control, as it was attached to the garage of a friend who sublet space to the new corporation’s staff of three…. Already Google.com, still in beta, was answering 10,000 search queries each day.” (©2008 Google. http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html) 10,000 queries a day!

And in July 2008 we read on Google’s blog :

“We’ve known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we’ve seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days — when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!” (©2008 Google. http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html)

Google indexes and oversees the knowable world. Of course, this world is only knowable to us within the manageable limits of our personal interests and within our tolerance for threats to our psychological safety—new information comes with a risk. Our range of interests and the depth and breadth of what we can know about these interests go vastly beyond what was possible in earlier generations. Fortunately, Google’s algorithms usually deliver the most relevant information to the people making search requests; if all matches were returned that contained the search criteria (complete recall), we would be hopelessly overwhelmed. If only a small number of (precisely) relevant matches were returned, we would lose invaluable resources. “Precision measures how well a system retrieves only the relevant documents. Recall measures how well a system retrieves all the relevant documents.” (Morville, Peter. Ambient Findability. O’Reilly Media 2005, Sebastopol CA. p. 49) Google manages to balance our human need for relevance with a need for relative completeness. In other words, Google presents us the knowable world that is personally relevant to our queries, our interests—the knowable world, then, is manageable and “useful” (remembering Google’s mission).

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