Google bombing, for those who don’t know, is messing around with Google’s popularity-based PageRank algorithm to re-sort or manipulate results.
Several years ago, a number of folks started an email campaign, focused on teachers like me who linked to Martin Luther King.org, requesting that we remove our links in an effort to move the Storm Front neoNazi site down lower on Google’s result lists.
Many of us who used the site in our teaching, resisted. I resented this coercion. Why should I have to revise my site? MLK.og, awful and extreme as it is, is just one site emphasizing the need for learners to select and evaluate sources, or to begin a biographical search in an alternate search tool.
Now, through Web-based blogs and wikis, we have power to link and manipulate results far more easily and with far more impact than was possible in the old days of html editors. Will Richardson describes the current Google bombing campaign in his Weblogg-ed. MLK.org has now moved down from its number 1 spot in Google. Yet another campaign associates the word “failure” with our White House.
I love Stephen Downes’ comment on Will’s blog:
The master gives the workers the tools they need to work. The master takes away the tools when they begin to tear down the house.
The implication is: so long as what we’re doing online (such as messing around with Google rankings) benefits them, they are happy to let it continue. But if it begins to threaten their lordship over things (’tearing down the house’) they take the tools away.
I have been thinking about this small saying a lot recently. About how much of our new empowerment is genuine, and how much exists only through the benevolence of the masters.
Sharing the idea of the campaign with students is an ultimate information fluency activity. Our students should know how the world’s favorite search tool operates and how all types of people “work” it.
While this particular response to neoNazi activity appears democratic, and noble, something about it leaves me cold and frightened. I can easily see Google bombing used in damaging ways. What happens when our writings, our ideas, our professions, our friends are on the other side of the bomb? How does that lesson play out? What should we teach about ethics and citizenship and reason?
I chatted with my husband about this campaign and he too was troubled. We generated some even bigger questions.
Most of the people involved in the MKL.org Google bombing are educators. In fact, classes participated.
Are teachers who lead classes in such activities using learners as instruments of political suppression of the speech they happen to disagree with? While it might seem admirable to suppress such hateful speech, rationalizing we are protecting our society, should we use young peole to combat the speech we happen to find distateful? Where do we draw the line? At the offensive? The slanderous? The merely unpopular based on current mores?
Particular teachers determined that this particular speech deserved suppression. And that should lead us to recall other incidents of “unpopular” speech.
- What about the outcry against depictions of Islam by the Danish cartoonist?
- When Galileo expressed the crazy idea that the earth was NOT the center of the universe, he was labeled “heretic” and his books were burned.
- One of the greatest teachers, Socrates, taught by asking difficult questions: Who are we? Why are we here? What should we be doing? For corrupting youth, his ideas were suppressed; he was sentenced to die.
- When the original Nazis decided that certain liberal philosophies were incompatible with the ascendance of an Aryan race, books were burned, information was suppressed.
Our country was founded on the idea that ideas are powerful and that we need to examine ideas with reason, truth, and light. We are forced to deal with all types of information suppression in our life and work. Should we now be the ones who lead it?
What is the real lesson in this experience?
