Interview: About Google's Eric Schmidt

part one of a three-part interview

[robertclough]

[alwayson-network.com...]

[vincevincevince]

re the last bit of that.... i was under the impression that "falun gong" and "tibet" were filtered...

[GoogleGuy]

That's a common misperception. Not filtered by us (or with any help from us).

[genericusername]

My argument ten years ago was that the Internet was created to provide enough fodder for people to get Ph.D.s in anthropology again. Because all the previous Ph.D.s have been written, they have studied every known society. So we just invented a thousand more.

I was hoping for more of these structural/theoretical insights from someone like Schmidt. This is the most salient of the insights he presents, but it's not particularly novel. It's already been thorougly masticated over by the media and a variety of academics. One such example is Aycock in "Technologies of the Self:" Foucault and Internet Discourse. I doubt that there will be much to study beyond the banal in terms of "internet subcultures".

[...]To present a Foucauldian perspective on fashioning of self online I use instances of recent postings to the Usenet news group rec.games.chess. [...] Finally, I consider some implications of this Foucauldian approach for future research on Internet self-constructions.

[ascusc.org...]