by Shirley Niemans

On monday March 1, Dutch newspaper NRC Next devoted two pages to articles on Google. One article by Peter Teffer, ”Maakt het internet ons dommer?” (does the Internet dumb us down?) features an interview with Geert Lovink. The other article is an experiment by two NRC reporters, Teffer and Pfauth, who attempted to live and work without the use of any Google service for a week. The article and report (both in Dutch) are online here.

In the last week of January, an NYU graduate class conducted a similar experiment, see an earlier blog post on it here.

Naar aanleiding van de Society of the Query conferentie, die gehouden is in november 2009, is er een interessant interview afgenomen met Siva Vaidhyanathan voor Vrij Nederland.

Siva is de auteur van het boek ‘the Googlization of Everything‘ dat momenteel geschreven wordt. Een boek over één bedrijf, Google, een volledige cultuur, economie en community kan veranderen en waarom wij ons daarover zorgen zouden moeten maken.

Lees het interview ‘Google is een religie’ nu op de Vrij Nederland website.

Een videoregistratie van Siva Vaidhyanathan’s lezing tijdens The Society of the Query kun je hier bekijken als webcollege, of lees het verslag van zijn presentatie op het SOTQ blog.

The Society of the Query werd georganiseerd door het Instituut voor Netwerkcultuur, nieuwe media onderzoekscentrum aan de Hogeschool van Amsterdam.

INC’s research intern Dennis Deicke wrote his second book review, of
Stefan Weber’s Das Google-Copy-Paste-Syndrome: Wie Netzplagiate Ausbildung und Wissen gefährden. Heise Verlag, Hannover: 2009.

The Google-Copy-Paste-Syndrome: How Web-Plagiarism endangers Education and Knowledge, written by Stefan Weber, deals with the influence of the ever-increasing internet use on the prevalent culture of knowledge. Austrian media scholar Weber states that the soaring spread of the new media results in a „text culture without brains.“ Stefan Weber decided to become a plagiarism-scientist after he discovered that a theologian from Tübingen has written off 90 sites of his own dissertation. Since that he has collected 14 folders with over 60 cases of plagiarism which build the base of his work. Internet enhances plagiarism in schools, journalism, the arts and especially at universities. Weber criticizes current media and cultural studies programs which ignore the augmented emergence of plagiarism due to an exaggerated optimism towards new media, thereby enhancing the problem by spreading their infinitely technophile theories.
The review can be found here.
Or visit the Society of the Query website for more search engine theory book reviews: http://www.networkcultures.org/query/.