Am I addicted to Google? Probably, maybe, more than likely. I don't see anything wrong with it though. I think Google has done its job as a company. It has created a brand that has become synonymous with the product it creates. Its no different from what what Coke has done with soft drinks, or Xerox has done with copy machines. Nobody says "I'll take a soda" they say "get me a Coke." Whens the last time someone has asked you to copy a document? Instead they would say "Xerox this this for me." Now you don't "Internet search" anything, you Google it. I'm fine with it, it's a fun word to say. As far as them being too powerful, I would have to say that is yet to be seen, as of right now I see them only as a forever expanding, very large company with what seems to be endless resources. Yahoo! is still making money, they used to be the top dog. There will always be something that comes along and improves on and becomes more successful than its predecessor. Look at Myspace, at one time they were the end all for all social networking sites. Along came Facebook with a few modifications and has dominated the game ever since. How different are the two, really? And know it seems that Twitter is taking some of Facebook's thunder, at least Facebook has allowed the tweets to function through Facebook.
Every era there is a corporation that seems to monopolize an industry until its competitors figure out what they are doing and how to combat them. You had the railroad companies, telephone companies, and more recently Clear Channel monopolizing the radio (basically). I wouldn't say I or we have become too dependant on Google, personally I don't really prefer one search engine over the other, I don't even check to see which one I'm using. It could be Bing, Yahoo, or anything else as my default search engine, I just like to say "Google." Now if you ask me have we become to dependant on new media and the Internet as a whole, I would have to give a deafening yes...but that's a whole other blog post.
I like how you put it. I don't have any problem with saying I "googled" either, and just like you mentioned there are so many examples of big companies that nowaday, we just use the name of company. The other example that I have is the "Kleenex". I don't usually hear people saying give me a tissue, but they say, do you have a "kleenex"?
ReplyDeleteGreat point :)
I like to say "I googled" or "let's google!" too. Even if we don't search with Google, we use "Google" as a verb for searching. It shows the authority that Google has. However, in near future, we may no longer say "google." There might be another word for "Internet search."
ReplyDeleteGood post Jon. Google has become the dominant brand of our era (just like Coke and Xerox were the dominant brands of the 1960s and 70s) and become a part of common parlance. But Google's aspirations are, if anything, even more grandiose than those two corporate behemoths: they want to "organize the world's information and knowledge" and make it "universally accessible." With big dreams come big responsibilities.
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