Don't be evil.

“Why ‘Google’?“ – That's a question I would expect from colleagues and friends. Not because they had anything against ‘the big G.’ nor me using it, but because they had always heard my own complaints about Google. Now what has led me to the point where I put aside old opinions and prejudices and chose to start blogging, mailing, reading and posting news with G.-related services?

For many years I regularly joined in when it came to stress concerns about “the G-phenomenon” – usually whispering the words “Big Brother” sooner or later. Believing that any kind of uncontrollable monopolism is potentially dangerous, I was sceptical about the company’s ‘illegitimate power’. Hence, speaking from the scientific point of view, there is no mutual accountability connecting users (not only customers) and company, which would appropriately correspond to the deep insight G. has into individual and possibly private concerns due to its ‘data-mining’ practices.

Google is not freeware: here the customer’s currency is individual attention and personal data.

That’s why I think it is important to ask about G. handling data with the necessary diligence and to demand maximum transparency. However, G. offers many services, useful tools and promising ideas only accompanied by privacy issues. Although there seems to be no way around G. nowadays, everybody still is free to decide against using it, to not actively give away private information or to simply chose from hundreds of different offers (of course users can not prevent G. from scanning the traces they leave surfing the internet).

For developing countries the prior question is more fundamental: “It’s the access, stupid!”

Being professionally involved in development cooperation projects (lately concerning media development) and well aware of today’s growing importance of public access to free information and the possibility to easily sort and filter it (which to me is fundamental to legitimately label internet “new media”) made me change my mind. This blog itself is one result of my reconsideration.
As always, it started with a concrete problem to be solved: to set up a barrier-free way (i.e. no editing or log-in required) of compiling data on delimited topics. Since I’ve also had some experience setting up a CMS (“Serendipity”) actually using css and php, I was very pleased with the fact, that the implementation of “Blogger” leaves it up to you to focus on content and/or design and offers fast and easy ways of compiling different kinds of content and sources without taking away too much project time by going into technical/programming details. Also, there is only one central log-in required to use all G.-services (if you only want to blog and don't need or want to implement i.e. g-mail or g-reader with full functionality, I recommend to check out "Wordpress").

It’s simple: in the digital century, easy access to and control of ICT are basic needs and G. provides just that.

To me it is a question of responsibly making use of the bare service in order to actually support the development of what could become new ways of vital civil society commitment. It is up to the users to be both trusting and reflecting.

Yet, it is Google’s responsibility to stay trustworthy.

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