Wondering what globalization is? Just Google it

Whether I have a big paper I need to research for, I need directions to a new restaurant or I want to find the lyrics to my new favorite song - all these important questions that define my everyday life lead me to the same place: Google.

It has become a common vocabulary word in our everyday lives.  We don’t “look up” information anymore; instead it’s become second nature to advise your friends and colleagues to simply “Google it.” With a mere click of the search bar the world’s seemingly hidden information is instantly at our fingertips. In sheer seconds we become global consumers of information.

According to Ken Auletta, author of “Googled: The End of the World as We Know It,” 70 percent of all searchers world-wide use Google. Google news provides 25,000 news sites daily to its audience, and the site is working on making almost every book ever published digitally available (1).

News sources come to us online from hundreds of countries. Advertisers compete for space on Google, which “revenues more than 20 billion dollars a year” (Auletta, 1).  Google applications are readily available for anyone with internet capabilities on their cell phones. As the search engine revolutionizes our world into a global one, it is also evident that huge impacts are being made on media as well.

Google is a prime example of how swiftly and subtly globalization has become prominent in our everyday lives.  I sometimes wonder how I could ever survive without the convenience and simplicity of the search engine (which happens to be my homepage on every browser installed on my computer). It’s a service that is taken for granted, yet essentially what it is doing is swiftly destroying the barriers that used to separate the individual from the world. Now, information is available to us from almost anywhere.

Recently, Google was in the news for its conflict with China pertaining to censored search results. Originally, the Chinese government and Google had an arrangement that searches made with the Chinese language would have limited results. However, for numerous reasons Google recently made the decision to stop censoring these results in order to “increase access to information for people in China.”

For more information about Google and its impacts on media and our globalized world, check out these sites:

Google talks about Google:

http://www.google.com/corporate/
Problems amongst Competition:
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/07/29/google-the-search-party-is-over
More info on Google censorship:
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/web/09/21/google.transparency/index.html