"As well as trying to ensure that information is accessible to all, Google is involved in trying to make sure that people are accessing more and more information via the Web. Google has done this by pioneering a brilliant new model of business expansion, introduced here as infogration. Infogration is radically different from the traditional model of horizontal integration, which involves buying up competition, and vertical integration, which involves buying upstream and downstream industries. Infogration involves capturing different aspects of physical and social reality and representing them with digital information. In other words, infogration involves the integration of aspects of the world in to the medium of information into which targeted ads can then be placed.
To be successful, infogration requires that we live more of our lives on the Web. Hence, Google has been actively encouraging us to live more of our lives in the 'Googleverse'."
~ Vivienne Waller (https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2477/2279)
"Shirky says it’s a common misconception that protesters are seeking privacy from the state. 'Most of them are concerned with activism, not privacy,' he says."
~ Tanya Basu (https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/06/06/1002546/google-docs-social-media-resistance/)
“Everything that Google has done to make people stay on the page and make results more accessible has resulted in a set of editorial decisions that mean we’re no longer getting straight search results that take us away from the page, but are in some kind of Upside Down Google Funhouse Internet where the content is brought directly to us, and the internet that is brought to us is stripped of context, of the richness of the pages on their own pages, wrapped up in Google’s business logic.”
~ Vicki Boykis (https://vicki.substack.com/p/google-and-the-nothing)
"The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that the world now runs on Google, and if Google Docs ever went down, it would be an even larger blow to the economy than Zoom or Excel at this point, but that the more it stays up, the more this cloud app owned entirely by Google becomes the most dangerous weakest link in all of our workflows."
~ Vicki Boykis (https://vicki.substack.com/p/google-drive-is-production)