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  3. An advertising agency has monopolised, disorganised, and commercialised the largest library in human history. Without a fundamen

An advertising agency has monopolised, disorganised, and commercialised the largest library in human history. Without a fundamen

admin2014-06-25  29
问题     An advertising agency has monopolised, disorganised, and commercialised the largest library in human history. Without a fundamental rethinking of the way knowledge is organised in the digital era, Google’s information coup d’etat will have profound existential consequences.
    Google was originally conceived to be a commercial-free search engine. The inventors of Google warned that advertising corrupts search engines. Under the sway of CEO Eric Schmidt, Google currently makes nearly all its money from practices its founders once rightly abhorred. In the gleeful words of Schmidt, "We are an advertising company. " Google is not a search engine; it is the most powerful commercialising force on the internet.
    Every era believes their way of organising knowledge is ideal and dismisses prior systems as nonsensical. Academic libraries in the US use subject categorisation derived from Sir Francis Bacon’s 17th-century division of all knowledge into imagination, memory and reason. Yet who today, aside from one or two exceptions, would try to organise the internet using a handful of categories? For a generation trained to use Google, this approach seems outmoded, illogical or impossible. But modern search engines, which operate by indexing instead of categorising, are fundamentally flawed.
    Three hundred years ago, Jonathan Swift foresaw the cultural danger of relying on indexes to organise knowledge. He believed index learning led to superficial thinking. Swift was right and a growing number of teachers and public intellectuals are coming to the realisation that search engines encourage skimming, light reading and trifling thoughts. Whereas subject classification creates harmony and encourages unexpected findings, indexes fracture knowledge into pieces making us stupid. Thanks to Google, the superficiality of index learning is infecting our culture, our society, and our civilisation.
    Google did not invent the index. Nor was Google the first to dream of indexing all of human knowledge. And Google was not the first to cynically dump advertisements into the search-engine index. What makes Google unique is the extent to which it has, oblivious to the consequences, made a business out of commercialising the organisation of knowledge.
    The vast library that is the internet is flooded with so many advertisements that many people claim not to notice them anymore. As evidenced by the tragic reality that most people can’t tell the difference between ads and content any more, this commercial barrage is having a cultural impact. The omnipresence of internet advertising constrains the horizon of our thought. The prevalence of commercial messages traps us in the marketplace. No wonder it has become nearly impossible to imagine a world without consumerism. Advertising has become the distorting frame through which we view the world.
    There is no system for organising knowledge that does not carry with it social, political and cultural consequences. Nor is an entirely unbiased organising principle possible. The trouble is that too few people realise this today. We’ve grown complacent as researchers; lazy as thinkers. We place too much trust in one company, a corporate advertising agency, and a single way of organising knowledge, automated keyword indexing.
Which of the following statements about Google is true?
选项 A、It has monopolized digital information.
B、It is viewed as the largest library in human history.
C、It is an inborn commercial search engine
D、Its advertising practices are opposed by its current CEO.
答案A
解析 第一段首句指出，一家广告公司已经垄断了人类历史上最大的图书馆。第二句作者则提出，我们重新审视数字化时代组织知识的方式，否则谷歌的信息政变将会产生严重的现实后果。可见，第一句中的“一家广告公司”即指谷歌，“人类历史上最大的图书馆”即指网络世界、数字信息。故[A]选项正确。
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