PdF Keynote: Eric Schmidt and Tom Friedman on “How Technology is Changing Politics”
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | May 21, 2007 | Share This
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Thomas Friedman and Google CEO Eric Schmidt kicked off the Personal Democracy Forum, a day-long conference about how “technology is changing politics”. The bulk of their discussion touched on personal privacy in the era of search, networked media, and government censorship, with an emphasis on Google’s role in all of these. Tom Friedman, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of The World is Flat, did a really great job of leading the conversation and setting the tone for the rest of the morning’s “flat world” talks.
I was especially interested in Schmidt’s comments on personalized search in the context of the “network effect”. As more and more people add information to a network, he said, it makes that network more valuable. Schmidt attested,
“If you use a personal version of Google, we learn more about you and can tailor the results more and more. A little creepy sometimes, but it’s a powerful notion that a computer could understand you.”
Creepy, indeed, though it seems to me that Google’s personalized search is less about building a network (which implicitly includes other people) than about creating a framework for a single user.
Schmidt also talked about the political impact of instant access and the ability to author, search and globalize content. He pointed out that social media allows small groups of people to amplify typically inconsequential details. During a political campaign, for example, a politician’s minor error is easily snowballed into an enormous reputation management nightmare. But, he said, the Internet also functions as a “truth detector” (formerly known as a “lie detector”?) and that as voters become more search savvy, they are less likely to believe everything published online. In the meantime, search engines do a better job of helping people sort out verifiable content.
Friedman pointed out that George Bush would probably never have been elected president if his every move at Yale was recorded by a cell phone camera. Schmidt jokingly responded, “By age 21, it should be acceptable to change your name and essentially start over” - this would be the antidote, he said, to “too much sharing at a young age” proffered by blogs and social media. Though Schmidt wasn’t being serious, I would argue that rather than needing an ‘antidote’, the MySpace/Facebook generation is shifting the paradigms of acceptable behavior; perhaps the transparency created by Internet media is making everyone (including future employers, etc.) inured to photos of people playing beer pong. Schmidt argued that we’re going to have to learn how to “live with historical records” and that this will change what people “offer of themselves” publicly on blogs and other media.
On that note, Schmidt discussed Google’s increasing role in government. Schmidt said that the company deals with issues of government pressure on a case-by-case basis. The cost of censorship, he said, is often an even bigger problem for governments than the censored issue itself. In Bahrain, for example, the government blocked Google Earth because Bahrainis could see how much land was held by the royal family. But in doing so, the Bahraini Government undermined their authority on the national land issue.
On the topic of censorship, Schmit discussed Google’s experiences with the “great firewall” of China. Google’s compromise on censorship is to omit censored search results, but tell the user that there are results being censored. Schmidt argued that this transparency prompts the user to find the information via alternative means (namely, getting around that firewall).
In sum, the internet is creating huge issues for governments that are used to being in control of public information. In the United States, politicians not present in search and social media results could find themselves with huge reputation management problems. Despite this, the increased activity of users online is creating a wealth of information that helps search engines better perform. When search engines do a better job of filtering results, people have better access to information. The spread of information empowers individuals to make smarter choices, which in turn, makes the community stronger.
Topics: Conferences & Events, ECommerce, Google, International, Media Convergence, Technology |
If you’re interested in seeing notes from this keynote and this conference, check out my blog at http://blog.isabelhilborn.com