Published on March 31, 2008

Cultural historian, media scholar and author Siva Vaidhyanathan will present "The Googlization of Everything," on April 11, from 10 to 11:30 a.m., in Foster Auditorium, 101 Pattee Library. Vaidhyanathan is associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia and is the author of Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (New York University Press, 2001) and The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (Basic Books, 2004).

Vaidhyanathan's articles have appeared in many publications, including the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Times Magazine, and American Scholar, and he is a frequent contributor to National Public Radio and MSNBC.com. He has also appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Vaidhyanathan is a critic of the ongoing Google digitization initiative-a massive, multi-year project involving the digital scanning of millions titles from the collections of a number of prominent research universities, including Penn State.

"In less than 10 years since the search engine first appeared and spread through word of mouth, Google.com has utterly infiltrated our culture," says Vaidhyanathan. "It is a ubiquitous brand, used as a noun and a verb everywhere from adolescent conversations to scripts for Sex and the City. It puts previously unimaginable resources at our fingertips-huge libraries, vast archives, eras of government records, troves of goods, the comings and goings of whole swaths of humanity. It is more than the most interesting and successful Internet company of all time. As it catalogs our individual and collective judgments, opinions, and (most importantly) desires, it has grown to be one of the most important global institutions as well. As we shift more of our Internet use to Google-branded services such as GMail and YouTube, Google is on the verge of being indistinguishable from the Internet itself."

Vaidhyanathan says his presentation argues that "The Googlization of Everything is a revolutionary phenomenon that will determine the ways both firms and governments act in coming years for - and at times against - their users." To understand this phenomenon, he says, users need to realize that they are not Google's customers, but its product.

Vaidhyanathan's thoughts on Google can be read in his blog: http://www.googlizationofeverything.com/. Through the blog, Vaidhyanathan is gathering and sharing ideas and material that he intends to synthesize into a book of the same name. In the blog, he describes this project as "dedicated to exploring the process of writing a critical interpretation of the actions and intentions behind the cultural behemoth that is Google, Inc."

This presentation is sponsored by the University Libraries Colloquia Committee and is free and open to the public. For more information, call Deborah Richner (814-863-5448), or e-mail dgr4@psulias.psu.edu.