They are always the same newspaper apologists, actually, but here is a new spin on how (now) it’s Google killing the newspapers.
Here’s the gist: “The supplier has no real choice but to work with the middleman.”
Well, no. China has a choice. Korea has a choice. And, even though they will eventually come to regret it, copyright lawyers have a choice.
Google provides critical mass and, related, ubiquity. Because of the economic system in which Google resides, it also provides monopoly, but this is more an outcome of economic context than social function.
Carr’s argument reduces to this: Newspapers are forced to consolidate (i. e., to become monopolies) in order to negotiate meaningfully with the increasingly monopolistic Google. He predicts, for instance: “If all [newspapers] stay, none of them will ever get enough traffic to make sufficient money.”
Carr — and newspapers — are stuck in the wrong context.
If ALL THINGS of value are on Google, then what becomes increasingly valuable is THAT ONE THING of value that is NOT on Google. As you thumb through your Google reader now, don’t you get the feeling that everybody else is reading what you are reading? Where, you might be wondering, is the really good stuff that nobody else is reading? Where is the stuff — the valuable stuff — that is not so common, so ubiquitous, and so drearily already Googled?
Carr and others seem to assume that such valuable stuff does not exist.
Perhaps they should assume that newspapers have not provided anything other than the common and the ubiquitous, which has, in the past, been packaged as the true and the only. Google is simply unwrapping the packaging of the “news.” Once that packaging is unwrapped, the “news” is not that true, it’s not that only, and it’s really not all that valuable.
You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
Johnny’s in the basement
Mixing up the medicine
I’m on the pavement
Thinking about the government
