guff

Technological Apathy from the Other Side

I’m visiting Google for a fourth time since setting up Blurried Musings just over two months ago, to convince them to list me. Each time I submit my URL I’m in essence requesting the honor of a visit, annoying them to do a quick seek-crawl through my site and gather whatever data they require so they’ll list me. Each time I do this seven to ten days will pass before it appears under queries on the Google site, which I notice because of the referral hits I start to get from there. But a few days later, maybe a week’s worth, it vanishes from their index, and I’m off again handing in my link. This is starting to feel like begging.

I can’t say why I drop out of favor with Google on a regular basis. It could be that the site remains hosted on blog*spot. There’s literally hundreds of thousands of individual blogs squatting here, and perhaps the good folk in Google middle-management feel avoiding a permanent knowledge of them is a good thing. I know some search engines do this with huge free hosting sites like Geocities.

Certainly many of the “family values” inspired Web filtering companies prefer to block access to entire online communities like Geocities or Tripod en masse. Presumedly it’s too much and too frequently changing to try and keep track of it all. That it smacks of discriminatory bias obviously doesn’t faze them a bit. It’s a rule of returns: if you have a vast menagerie of morally questionable Web pages (I defer the point that many remove all doubt) buried in an even greater collection of sites, you either go broke hiring the gargantuan staff required to sort through them all and verify those allowed under your guidelines, or you just stop listing their entire virtual city on your maps. I understand the motivation, but a prejudiced snubbing is no worse when the reasons behind it are purely dispassionate, technical ones.

Dealing with crap like this is all the harder for me, as I’ve worked behind the scenes in an environment where a paramount task was finding ways to handle the hordes of Netizens. At those times when something tilts a large network with a larger user base, you need the when and the where (and the how; always the how), and it comes down to knowing where users were when the problem occurred, and what they were doing that screwed it up. An important question for businesses with a modicum of concern over privacy issues, as well as the demands in housing all that data, is how to track someone’s comings and goings without actually keeping track. The optimal point between managing too much information and too little is — to understate it — not an easy one to locate.

And it can’t be done with just people. Actually, it probably can’t be done with us at all. We’ve come to rely on computers to perform the horribly nitty-gritty in our everyday workloads, whether or not they do it well. That they do it fast is all that matters, because it comes down to the fact that we have way too much information floating around for us to take in and manipulate successfully without unbelievably fast and nimble minds. Computers are now the nearly permanent subs for us in that capacity. Not in all areas; not yet. But when they are slipped in, by default they are expected to take over much of the critical thinking involved in wielding that information as well. As long as the work gets done, right? At least we have more free time.

Some folks worry over a future time when computers will run the world. I’m stuck trying to convince them that time is already here. They just happen to be as indifferent and stupid about it as we were. In a way, it’s comforting to know that.