by Molly Ivors
I have a dark confession to make: despite the fact that I have passed by 40th birthday, I am not, by any reasonable definition, a Cougar. I say this to my shame, because there used to be a point at which you could stop worrying about your youthfulness and figure and just accept that producing human beings, and feeding, housing, educating, and caring for them, tended to interfere with your fierce smokes-and-speed-and-exercise regimen, but apparently, those days are long gone. I didn't like competing for 20 year olds when I was in my twenties, why on earth would I do it now? (I confess I did like it in my teens.)
But there's a big difference between eschewing the role of Stacy's Mom (admittedly, not the FoW song which usually springs to mind--hey, it's not just me!) and openly sneering at the fact that the world is changing. Maureen Dowd can barely contain her gleeful evisceration of Google, the company newspapers fear most. They're children! With toys! They have candy! And wheatgrass!
Eric Schmidt looks innocent enough, with his watercolor blue eyes and his tiny office full of toys and his Google campus stocked with volleyball courts and unlocked bikes and wheat-grass shots and cereal dispensers and Haribo Gummi Bears and heated toilet seats and herb gardens and parking lots with cords hanging to plug in electric cars.
The C.E.O. of Google doesn’t look like a Dick Cheney World Domination sort whom we should worry about as Google ogles our houses, our oceans, our foibles, our movements and our tastes.
And yet, they're evil, too, like Big, well, Little Brother, tracking your searches and sharing your secrets right on the wall!
Look, concerns about Google's caching of personal material have been around for at least a decade: I know I first taught the 2038 cache expiration thing at least five years ago (when my students begged me not to give them papers on terrorism, lest they be targeting for googling Al Qaeda). And what they've colluded to do in China is, yes, downright evil.
But Schmidt is right, in a certain sense, when he notes that privacy concerns have changed radically. The dividing line seems to be in the area of 30 or so: people older than that worry that their purchases online (or even instore with a credit card) are being tracked, that their phones are being traced, that their personal information is at the mercy of any reasonably competent teenager. Under 30, not so much. They gleefully send nekkid pics of themselves to each other over their phones and are generally pretty cavalier about their information being "out there." MySpace and Facebook have fundamentally changed the philosophy of privacy.
But let's be honest: that's really not Maureen's concern here. Raising these issues is just a way to dismiss the very real challenge posed by Google to the newspaper industry. And typically, the column turns into a whiny all-about-meeeeeeee! rant. Like the manager of the haunted amusement park, tirading about Those Meddling Kids is only interesting once. Maybe there was a benefit to the greatest risks posed by a news source being paper cuts and ink stains, but that simply is not the world we live in anymore. And Maureen does eventually get to the point where she admits it's all about her sorry ass.
When I ask him if human editorial judgment still matters, he tries to reassure me: “We learned in working with newspapers that this balance between the newspaper writers and their editors is more subtle than we thought. It’s not reproducible by computers very easily.”
Shit, Google, I can generate you a Dowd program. It's equal parts Ann Althouse, Freud, and Gloria Swanson, with just a dash of Lois Lane for gravitas. The Maureen Dowd Opinion Generator really isn't that complicated, but then I do wonder how necessary it is. Still, if you're interested, drop me a line: we'll go into development.
Look, I don't know the answer to the problem of newspapers vs. the internet, and clearly it *is* a problem. Personally, I'm teaching journalism next semester with a strong internet component, because it's irresponsible not to. But pretending that any one writer, especially one as shallow and self-obsessed as Dowd, is irreplaceable is ridiculous on the face of it. There is value on the Times Op-Ed page, but it's not you. What Krugman does takes education, Maureen. What you do takes self-regard.