1. The document discusses how individuals in Europe have begun requesting that Google remove over half a million links from its search results and database due to a European Court of Justice ruling that required Google to accept removal requests. 2. The document analyzes this trend through the lenses of Marshall McLuhan's communications theory about how technologies enhance, obsolete, retrieve, and reverse aspects of culture, as well as the idea that cultural values like privacy have driven social change in Europe due to histories of totalitarian governments. 3. The analysis suggests privacy will continue growing as an issue worldwide as jobs become automated and societies aim to avoid unfairly prejudicing individuals' employment prospects without full contextual information.

1. Copyright Kurt Callaway, 2014
Application 1 Section Paper
Kurt Callaway, FORE 6331
16 Oct 14
One of the greatest developments of the Digital Age is the availability of seemingly all the world’s
information at the cost of a few keystrokes within a Google search engine box. Since it began as a
research project at Stanford University in 1996, Google Search has grown into the pre-eminent tool for
plumbing the vastness of the World Wide Web. It is used for 65% of all the web searches done in the
world and serves approximately 3.5 billion search requests a day (“Google Search Statistics”, n.d.). With
over a trillion websites indexed, using proprietary algorithms for ranking answer relevance, it’s no wonder
Google is the world’s leading web search service.
Yet, in spite the size and sheer usefulness of Google’s search engine, a trend is growing that stands in
opposition to what it does best. As of early October 2014, Google has had to process nearly 150,0000
requests from European users asking to remove nearly half a million links from its database and search
results (“How individual privacy impacts search”, n.d.). The basis for this is a ruling by the European
Court of Justice that Google must accept and consider removal requests from any source. Why have a
growing number of people begun to push back against the convenient and powerful service Google places
at everyone’s fingertips? Social theory might help us understand this change. We will examine this
example in light of two theories, in the hope of capturing a complete and meaningful explanation.
Above all, Google Search is technology: hardware and software. Let us first apply to our example the
theory that it is technology that drives social change and use Marshall McLuhan’s “tetrad” approach as
described by Kappelman (2005, para. 19-20). McLuhan defined a quartet of impact types in which a
technology can effect cultural change: enhances, obsolesces, retrieves, and reverses. Using these as a lens
with which to consider Google’s search technology yields some useful insights.
1. The tech extends greatly humans’ ability to seek new information; satisfaction of their curiosity; the
exploration of new and different ideas; the toolkit for reaching a desired goal; the ability to monetize
the flow of information between people.
2. As it does this, it obsolesces the previous more-structured (and hence, more static) sources of
information, such as the library; the importance of physical copies of data (books); the need to
receive information personally from other humans; the time delay in acquiring information.
3. The technology retrieves (that is, allows people to regain) a feeling of knowledge; of knowing the
answers; of control and a sense of information organization; in short, a sense of fun.
4. Finally, and relevant to the example, Google’s formidable search engine technology over-extends into
too much information (low signal-to-noise ratio); too specific information (people can’t selectively
control what is available about them); reduction or confusion of the authority of a data source; a lack
of information context; and with the technology’s increasing sophistication, an ever-increasing
learning curve for proper use.
A culture confronted with these reversals is what we see: individuals uncomfortable with the type and
amount of data available about them (and the resultant loss of personal privacy), as well as the distortion
inherent in a lack of context when the data is used. Mittlestrass addresses this point when he notes that
information is “a form of communication” (n.d., page 20) and not the whole of knowledge. Personal
information lacking meaningful connection cannot be considered useful or balanced “knowledge” about
them, in the same sense that long lists of streets and addresses by themselves are not the whole of “The
Knowledge” that is required to be learned by every London cabbie.
A question the above technology-based analysis does not answer is why the Europeans have taken the lead
in allowing anyone to ask to be “forgotten” by the Google search database. For this it helps to refer to
another theory: that which says ideas can drive social change – in this case, by recognizing the notion of
Copyright Kurt Callaway, 2014 1

2. Copyright Kurt Callaway, 2014
privacy as a strong European cultural paradigm; one markedly different from that in the US. The New
York Times article by Julia Angwin expressed succinctly the largely business-friendly American view as “if
you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product.” (2014, para. 3) In contrast, the cultural affinity in
modern central Europe for privacy protection is a function of their recent history. From less than a century
ago ring the lessons of Nazi Germany, which used comprehensive official data on its own citizens (as well
as those in occupied nations, such as Holland) to identify Jews or other undesirables for arrest (Singleton,
1999, para. 13). Even more recently, the post-war communist governments of Eastern Europe also
surveilled and tracked their citizens. These cultural experiences left a feeling, in the words of Austrian
attorney and author Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, that “we can’t trust anybody – not the state, not a
company – to keep to its own role and protect the rights of the individual.” (Toobin, 2014, para. 11)
The two applications above offer an understanding how this backlash reflects an over-extension of the
technology itself, as well as why Europe has taken the lead in privacy protection. It seems reasonable to
infer from these insights that privacy will continue to grow as an issue around the world. Angwin’s article
shows it is a rising concern in the US, and a recent similar court decision in Japan indicates the topic may
be catching Asia’s attention too (Fujikawa, 2014, para. 1-2). Europe certainly isn’t the only continent with
a recent totalitarian past; that some of South America’s largest nations (such as Chile and Argentina) have
also experienced authoritarian regimes may help make those regions receptive to an awareness of the
importance of privacy protection. Finally, there’s a practical motivation, too: if jobs become more scarce
in the coming decades, thanks to the march of automation, the need to avoid prejudicing someone’s
chances for employment because of incomplete or non-contextual information about them becomes even
more important. Indeed, this may prove to be a case where society changes technology, if momentum
grows to make the Web, and the information available on it, more closely subject to each country willing to
do something about it -- one law at a time.
References:
Angwin, J. (2014, March 3). Has Privacy Become a Luxury Good? [The Opinion Pages]. The New York
Times. Retrieved October 5, 2014, from http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/04/opinion/has-privacy-
become-a-luxury-good.html
Fujikawa, M. (2014, October 10). Google Suffers New Privacy Setback in Japan. The Wall Street Journal.
Retrieved October 14, 2014, from http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/google-suffers-new-privacy-
setback-in-japan-1412933523-lMyQjAxMTE0MDEzMDUxNjAyWj
Google Search Statistics. (n.d.). Retrieved October 12, 2014, from
http://www.internetlivestats.com/google-search-statistics/
How individual privacy impacts search. (n.d.). Retrieved October 12, 2014, from
http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/europeprivacy/
Kappelman, T. (2005, May 25). Marshall McLuhan: The Medium is the Message. Retrieved October 12,
2014, from https://www.probe.org/marshall-mcluhan-the-medium-is-the-message/
Mittlestrass, J. (n.d.). The Loss of Knowledge in the Information Age. Available from
https://canvas.instructure.com/courses/870857/files/30372976
Singleton, S. (1999, November 30). Privacy and Human Rights: Comparing the United States to Europe.
Retrieved October 12, 2014, from http://cei.org/studies-issue-analysis/privacy-and-human-rights-
comparing-united-states-europe
Copyright Kurt Callaway, 2014 2

3. Copyright Kurt Callaway, 2014
Toobin, J. (2014, September 29). Google and the Right to Be Forgotten. [Annals of Law]. The New
Yorker. Retrieved October 12, 2014, from http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/29/solace-
oblivion
Copyright Kurt Callaway, 2014 3