George Jaramillo and David Domenico, of Colorado State University, showed a short, speculative film about a future Amazon/Google Goliath called “Googlezon” as a catalyst for audience discussion afterward. The discussion was pretty wide-ranging and interesting, with many in the audience quite concerned about authority and accuracy in the world of networked information.

I met two other bloggers very briefly at this session: Michael Sauers of Travelin’ Librarian and (Ms) Shaun Boyd who blogs on LiveJournal (and to whom I’m not linking, since LiveJournal always seems more like a real journal than a blog, and I don’t feel right linking without permission).

I also had an nice talk after the presentation with a woman who works for a small publisher in Boulder (whose name I didn’t get, and whose employer I have forgotten. Sorry!). We talked about intellectual property and rights and the ethics of a company like Google making money off authors and publishers without sharing. I said that while I want to see authors and publishers continue to make money, that I wasn’t so sure that every time someone makes a nickel off a book that they should get a penny. We talked about whether increased full-text exposure would result in lost or increased sales. I said that I would hate to see publishers end up like the RIAA, suing customers, employing bizarre DRM schemes, etc. Interesting stuff.

Click through for my full write up of this interesting “Googleization” session.

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George and David show EPIC 2014, a short film: by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson (there is a partial transcript here). The film presents a very speculative vision of the future where Google and Amazon merge. It’s not about libraries per se, but an idea of what the future information environment may look like. They ask us to keep track of our first, visceral reaction.

A brief synopsis: In the future (2014): everyone contributes to a networked world of information, but media as we know it is gone. Some milestones:

  • 2006, “Google Grid”: store all your stuff on the Google grid with granular control of privacy;
  • 2008: Google and Amazon form Googlezon: Amazon’s social structure with Google’s grid;
  • 2010: Newswars: Googlezon constructs news stories dynamically from all content sources, all content customized by user;
  • 2014: Googlezon Epic “Evolving Personalized Information Construct”. Everyone contributes, everyone gets paid from AdSense; freelance editors spring up; people subscribe to editors. Mainstream media withers and dies.

For its savviest users, EPIC is broader, deeper, etc. than anything available before. For others, EPIC is a mass of the trivial and untrue.

The presenters ask for audience reactions.

Many people are concerned about Google or “Googlezon” making it harder for people to sort out the trivial or incorrect from the authoritative; that a search on Google (today) will get you a page of misinformation about, say, a health issue, before finding a study that debunks common wisdom. I comment that I can’t see how that is any different than it has ever been–haven’t we always received misinformation and half-truths from family and friends? How many people have ever gone to the library to research a casual information need? And people have always believed all kinds of garbage (here I inserted a gratuitous dig against “Intelligent Design”).

George Jaramillo reports frustration with students finding some citations on Google Scholar and avoiding the expensive search engines the library provides.

George asks what we think about people saying that Google is the biggest threat to libraries. The audience is generallly sanguine, beliving that our role as research assistants, interpreters of search results, and trainers in information literacy will keep us in business. Someone says that librarians spend too much time questioning our own relevance, and need to work more with Google and their ilk (right on!). Someone else says that librarians need to create portals that are as easy to use for authoritative information as Google is for the wild wild web (right on!)

People bring up many other logical concerns about privacy, intellectual property, Googlebombing and other results manipulation/quirks of Google algorithms.

Somewhere in here I mention trusted social networks and the possibility that people will be able to fine-tune their searches to include more trusted sources (as those on the bleeding edge are already doing today with tools like My Web 2.0).

One of the comments that I found most helpful when thinking about this was from the librarian who said that when helping patrons, she would start “where they live” with Google or Google Scholar and Wikipedia, and then show them how and why they should move beyond that.