Google Gives Suicide Hotline Number For Certain Searches: Diets For Fast Food Next?

Nevermind complicated algorithms and personalized content streams according to past search patterns and the like - Google has, for only the second time in its history, decided to offer specific results, a sort of guidance, in response to select search terms.

When users search for phrases such as "ways to commit suicide" or "suicidal thoughts", they now see the toll-free number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at the top of their results. We have to wonder - when will Google advise users buying cigarettes to seek help too?

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The New York Times quotes Dr. Roni Zeiger, the chief health stategist for Google, as saying that the idea came from a Google user.

"A mother wrote in a suggestion to us -- her daughter had swallowed something that she thought was dangerous, and she had a hard time finding poison control," Dr. Zeiger said. "Now when you search for poison control or similar queries, we make it straightforward to find the number for poison control."

So can we be as callous here as to wonder where else the company might take this? Can anyone really take issue with a company offering the phone number of a suicide prevention hotline to those looking up phrases like "I want to die"?

Perhaps this could be a new direction - rather than simply offering results directly related to a user's query, or looking to personalize content by looking at what friends and peers are looking at, or even looking at a users history, Google could offer up a Devil's Advocate set of results on every query. Looking for a brand new SUV? While you're at it, why not consider this beautiful, used bicycle that will help save the environment? Cheap cigarettes? Didn't you mean Nicorette gum? McDonalds? Why yes, we do have a few diet programs and some instructions on healthy eating.

In reality, we think that this could be a great compliment to all those apps and engines out there that simply look to show you exactly what you're looking for before you ever even get to searching. Let's use the web to challenge ideas, not simply echo them. As long as results are clearly identified, is there a problem?

While this is a loaded area to look at (questioning Google's action can be made to seem as if it were a promotion of suicide) we still think there are interesting implications to its actions that should be considered. Do we want Google to simply act as a firehose of data or can we expect it to tailor its results to do better for the world? And who's version of better will it go by if we do? What do you think?

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Our Network is Alive

The British novelist Ian McEwan said, "The naming of what is there is what is important." But there is a thing, or an idea, a system or network, that we live with every day, that we live in, that we, in point of fact, are, which has no name.

When apprehending and recognizing something new, we humans name it. Some say we name things in order to control them and there might be some truth to that. But who would not elect to control an earthquake than be controlled by one?

Our information gathering network has changed out of recognition, but its taxonomy has lagged behind. We need to name this new network, and we would like the readership of ReadWriteWeb to help us.

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In the Big Room, our editorial chat room, we were speaking about the earthquake that struck Baja this afternoon.

Before the media, even the new media, got it, we had read it on Twitter. ReadWriteWeb has written before on the ability of this new tool, and others like it, to gather and disseminate information.

In the course of this discussion, we came to a surprising realization. Twitter was no more the issue than the so-called mainstream media was. We were beyond all of that now. Our network was not restricted to three news channels, or the cable news networks, or a handful of social media websites or thousands of Facebook accounts, or even all of those things taken as a whole. Our access to information, our ability to exchange it, was no longer bound by anything at all, with the possible exception of time. The reason for this sea-change is that we ourselves have in part become the system formerly we only used. We have become the fulcrum of our own network. Prometheus is well and truly unbound.

This network, the one that connects us to virtually every part of the world, to every person on the globe, branches like a Mandelbrot set. It consists of computing devices from desktop computers to laptops to tablets to phones; it consists of every program written to run those devices, every website and service that helps us to process and move the truths we witness or create; it consists of cell towers and server farms; it consists of social media tools and word processing programs; but above all it consists of, it is powered by, human beings, both singularly and in aggregate, minds and mind.

Our network is alive.

But it needs a name, and we don't have one. Jokingly, one of us called it The Culture. It isn't. It isn't even a culture. Just a network. But a vast one, a possibly game-changing one and, above all, a nameless one, one which we should control rather than allow to control us.

Help us assert control over an exciting, but daunting reality. What should this global network, this lace of machine and human, location, data and feeling, thought and thing, observer and observed, speaker and listener, be called?

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iPad Not Charging? Not Really

Bodies dropped in a faint across the International Date Line yesterday and today as panicked iPad users received the "Not Charging" message in the upper right-hand corner of their brand new tablets.

Even ReadWriteWeb was not free of the need for smelling salts as one of our new iPad-owners followed her instinct and hooked the tablet up to her laptop in the same fashion she always has for her iPhone. That feeling that mixes acid running down your bones and your stomach dropping into your shoes was temporary if acute. A bit of rummaging and she plugged the proprietary charger in.

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Endgadget reported that neither USB hubs nor Wingtel rings would charge the device either.

Apple's iPad support page on charging states that this is a result of insufficient power output from some computers, rather than a design fault. Further, if you put your iPad to sleep, it will charge up.

Either way, the charging constraint is an issue, mostly as it limits the available avenues to recharging on the go. But perhaps as important was the apparent failure in the company's user experience process. Not a hard ball to drop, given how intently a company and its teams live with the product they are developing, but an important one nonetheless. At the very least, the message "Not Charging" was inaccurate if not outright untrue.

Generally speaking, RTFM is not enough. Thinking through user experience, including testing by people outside the team, is mandatory. We will see if this sort of oversight will result in similar issues in the coming days.

Audrey Watters contributed to this report.

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You Are Not a Gadget: The Continuing Case Against Web 2.0

Jaron Lanier was a pioneer of "virtual reality" in the early 1980s and in his book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, he makes the case for a more humanistic approach to Internet technology. Lanier rails against web 2.0, which he calls at the start of the book "a torrent of petty designs" and "freedom [...] more for machines than people."

Lanier's main issue with web 2.0 is that, in his view, it promotes the 'hive mind' over individual expression. He writes that web 2.0 presents the current generation of kids with a "reduced expectation of what a person can be."

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Many new iPad owners might object that they're a reduced person because of their new gadget. Nevertheless, Lanier offers an intriguing counterpoint to web 2.0 philosophies and so it's worth exploring that.

Lanier is of course just the latest in a long line of web 2.0 cynics. They range in quality from the sharp critiques of Nicholas Carr, to the sensationalistic rantings of Andrew Keen. Lanier is thankfully more akin to Carr, in that he's thought provoking and brings something new to the table.

Lanier's theories are intriguing and in some cases very compelling. However, ultimately I found his "manifesto" to be fragmentary and lacking a definitive conclusion. I was not entirely convinced by the end of the book - which is a problem, because a manifesto should ideally provoke further action from its readers.

Wikipedia: Mob Rule

Wikipedia comes in for the most criticism in the book, because the online encyclopedia is written by an army of mostly anonymous people. Therefore, Lanier claims, Wikipedia stifles individual expression. According to Lanier, Wikipedia is "intellectual mob rule" and "seeks to erase point of view entirely." He goes so far as to call the individual voice "the opposite of wikiness."

Although this is an extreme view of Wikipedia, and wikis in general, I did find one point to be particularly compelling: Wikipedia dominates search results and for that reason it is suppressing individual voices. As Lanier put it, "Wikipedia provides search engines with a way to be lazy" - by putting Wikipedia results at or near the top of search results for millions of topics.

Facebook: Multiple-Choice Identities

Other Web 2.0 stalwarts don't escape Lanier's withering gaze.

Facebook is criticized for encouraging people to create "standardized presences," due to its black and white categorizations of people. Later in the book Lanier writes that Facebook organizes people into "multiple-choice identities."

Blogs are also criticized, for their "standardized designs" that encourage "pseudonymity" in features like blog comments. Lanier doesn't highlight though that the rise of blogs and other social media websites have given a voice to hundreds of thousands of people, who were previously excluded from the mainstream media landscape because they didn't have access to an adequate publishing platform.

Lanier: Elitist?

This is where I found myself most in disagreement with Lanier. Here is a highly intelligent and successful software architect, who hangs out with scientists and Internet intellectuals. Is it any wonder then that he is so gung-ho on individual expression? The people he associates with on a daily basis are the intellectual elite!

In my opinion Lanier is a bit too quick to dismiss the content of blogs and Twitter, simply because the design of those publishing platforms are "standardized." The design may well be standardized, but many people have created original and compelling content using these web 2.0 platforms. Even Lanier recognizes that if you look past the first layer of Wikipedia results in Google, you'll often find compelling individual voices.

The Network By Itself is Meaningless

Lanier's argument that web 2.0 designs "actively demand that people define themselves downward" is a compelling one. I agree that Wikipedia and Facebook both have significant flaws and that both are indeed contributing to a middling, less creative culture. In particular I am sympathetic to the notion that individual expression is suffering - every time I see an anonymous comment on ReadWriteWeb that is critical of something, I wince and immediately place less value on it than if the comment had a real name attached to it.

So, Lanier's concerns about the 'hive mind' and loss of individual expression are valid. He puts it rather poetically here:

"The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush. You then start to care about the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked, even though the network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful."

Beyond The Flaws of Web 2.0

However, I also think that Lanier glosses over the benefits of web 2.0 - that it gives everyone who has a computer (and nowadays a smart phone) a publishing platform with which to explore their creativity and have their say.

Regardless of what you think of the resulting content - whether it's largely unoriginal, or the best of it gets lost in noise, or aggregators make "mush" of it - the fact that web 2.0 has democratized the publishing industry is something that should continue to be celebrated. Lanier's book tends to dismiss this blossoming of new media as simply the product of web 2.0 "standardized designs" - and that comes across as elitist and pompous.

Overall, You Are Not a Gadget is a thought provoking and compelling book. If, like me, you find yourself iPad-less this weekend, then I'd encourage you to spend some time consuming this book.

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