[Riassunto italiano: Hermann Maurer, professore di informatica all'università di Graz, ci ha offerto una panoramica sul futuro, partendo dalle minacce di Google e di internet. Un'ottima occasione per cambiare punto di vista da parte di noi ricercatore, troppo spesso entusiasti dell'oggetto dei nostri studi.]
Hermann Maurer is a computer scientist, professor in Graz (Austria). He spoke in a seminar at the University of Lugano, last week.
The main theme was e-learning, but I did not attend that part.
I attended the one hour speech of the afternoon, where he spoke about Google and other issue on culture and internet.
Internet, mainly Google and Wikipedia, are really changing things. We, researchers in online communication, too often think that things are improving, thanks to the internet. Sometimes it’s good to gain another point of view.
Maurer thinks that Google is a threats in three areas:
- privacy: Google knows lot about you, even if you do not use any of his services (300.000 more popular websites do use Google Analytics, therefore Google knows surfing habits of lot of people). Update 20080605: one third of the top 500 websites in the world uses Analytics.
- culture: Google promotes the snippet culture and can decide who is in and who is out
- economics: Google foresees the future, because knows lot of things, and can modify trade.
In fact, I’d like to add that in my opinion, no one (entity or person) in human history has ever had the same amount of information that Google has today.
On future, Maurer said lot of interesting things on energy. He thinks that the only way to survive, for humankind, is to go in space.
