faith. i thought it was important to show google and get beyond the sense that google represents a force for good in the world or for that matter a force for evil in the world. i thought it was important to pay close attention to the mechanisms behind google to the fact that google is a company, and it should be both respected as a company and feared as a company, and for all those reasons, i thought it was healthier for us to bring google down to earth out of the habits. >> you write we may see google as a savior, but it rules like caesar. >> in the beginning, before google asserted its dictatorship over the web, there was chaos, and there were a number of competing forces out there making sense of the web and help us through. if you remember back in 1998 and 1999, maybe 2000, before almost

everybody you know started using google, many of us used yarks hue or any -- yahoo or other search services, none of which did the job of aiding in the navigation, and so it was chaos. there was no sense that the web offered a stable and dependable environment, for instance, for commerce or for communication, and google's rise, the brilliance of google enabled us to have space not only in the web in general, but now we do our banking and shopping and everything and trust what we find in google, that is all remarkably new. i'm trying to get us to remember back to the late, late 20th century when things with respect always so sure, and they weren't always so dependable on the web. google did a remarkable job giving us faith and confidence

in the web and thus in itself, and so it's not that i want to undo that, but i'd like us to revisit that story to understand how we got into this situation where google is the lens through which we explore the world. >> is google neutral? >> no, no al gore rhythm is knew rail. there are human beings who build these elaborate algorithms and when you ask human beings to do that, they decide what values to embed in the elk rhythms. at time people working at google have, i think, improperly claimed there is some level of neutrality, that they are really reflecting the larger passions and concerns of the web, the larger judgments of the web community when, in fact, i think we know now more than ever that people at google are concerned

about the web and want what they view as high quality sites to come up more and low quality sites to be degraded in the lankings, and so there's nothing about any computer system that is truly neutral. the real challenge for us as users is to understand the nature of the lack of neutrality. >> what's an algorithm? >> it's a set or a checklist, a device that is essentially computer code and it tells a computer a series of decisions to make, and so it's a mathematical concept originally, but now it's a computer code. it's essentially a set of instructions that walk through in order how to make certain decisions, turn left here, right there, if you go to google maps and you want to find directions to a restaurant, google maps then gives you an algorithm for you to follow.

our normal procedure is for human beings to tell computers what algorithms to follow, but it works both ways now. >> is google and other search engines making us smarter? >> i don't think either smarter or dumber. the question is are we making google smarter? i think we are. we are not only the product google sells to advertisers, which means, of course, we are not google's customers, but we're worker bees in the google systems. every time we interact with google, we give it information on which it makes decisions, and it refines results because the feed back we give it constantly. in a weird way, our constant interaction with google is making google reflect our interests, our passions, our prejudices in really profound ways. in addition, google is personalizing and localizing activities so you will get

different results from mine depending on our interests and where we are sitting when we search, and that has some really positive ramifications, for instance, it's better for shopping, but it's also negative because it's not good for learning. if we have an argument over environmental policy, we should be operating from the same set of facts and same set of documents originally, and that's not necessarily going to happen as google changes. now, our own enterer actions with google i don't think make us smarter or dumber, but i am concerned they make us sometimes too comfortable, maybe too lazy, too satisfied with the real power that google has to deliver a lot of information quite quickly in a focused way, in a way that as my wife tells me it almost seems to read her mind. that is so deductive, and i know i sound like a grumpy old puritan, but we have to resist

those seductions. in the long run, we would be better off occasionally doing things the hard way, trudging down to the library, talking to the librarian, seeking out nchtion -- information experts, challenging the results of google and using specialized search engines just to get a sense there is nothing certain or definite, no best way to do research, but there are multiple ways through the jungle of information and only through experience are we really going to master those techniques. >> going back to what you said about the customization of google searches. do they know too much about us? >> they know more about us than we know about it. i tried to address that in the book. for some of us, google knows a tremendous amount. if you use gmail or anything else that requires registration

like youtube, then google has a rich record of the sorts of things you think about, you work on, the sorts of people you communicate with. now, no human being at google is going through that and writing up a report and handing if over to the fbi, but the records exist somewhere, and if the fbi wanted to search for someone and as we know, the fbi doesn't always get it right, you could see services like google and many other services, google is hardly the worst defender in fact area, and let's think about fbi, giving over a lot of information causing damage in the world. it's one the reasons why google was so concerned and panicked about the notion that people within the people's republic of china breached security last year off their gmail system thus opening up a huge risk to a number of chinese using google services, so, yeah, we tend to keep information about

ourselves, a lot of information we might not want to share with our partners or with our parents or employers in systems like this, and part of that is we use google for everything, for so many different things in life, whereas in the real world, we block it off with the people we share information with and the records that you generate through your university stay at your university, and they don't necessarily leak out to all the other areas of your life, and that's true of your health records too. in the real world, we have these very helpful boxes and manage our reputations in various contexts because nothing ever gets blended. unfortunately, these days, google, facebook, many other services like this a blending all these contexts, and we're just starting to figure out whether that's going to present a high level of risk to anyone, but it will result at some point

in a nightmare for somebody. >> professor, is google becoming the custodian of america's records? >> oh, yeah, in a lot of ways it is. it's because google offers so many institutions a tremendous amount of storage space, essentially for no money or for little money. for instance, the city of los angeles has decided to googlize its entire process. all the e-mail, many of the word processing functions and spread sheet functions are handled through google. my own university, the university of virginia has decided to let google and microsoft handle student e-mail services in perpetuity, and there's a lot of pressure for us to do a lot more of our computational work. others are tempted by this as well. why pay a licensing fee to have

software on individual computers to do word processing when google at a low price or no price performs similar services, just hold the information on a server firm and somewhere in the pacific northwest, so our willingness to get stuff cheap or free is further concentrating an enormous amount of information. >> what is heptocracy? >> certain skills that tend to be the skills getting you into the iv league. you are apt at things like taking the sat, or writing the essays on the examines, and the novelist and essayist came up with this term and wrote about it in the new york times magazine two years ago, and he was trying to explain this --

it's not a class in wealth and status all the time, but it is a measure of success. if you learn to play the game in certain ways, you learn to give the professors what they want, the college board what it wants, and ultimately your likely to get rewarded with opportunities that just happen for you whereas the vast majority of americans don't break that code, and so it is an indication that there's certain institutions that work well based on these basic factors. google is one of them. everyone who succeeds at google succeeded because they majored in computer science at stanford, princeton or university of michigan. they got there because they cracked the success code in the united states. >> what was google's original connection with stanford in >> well, the two founders of google were doing graduate work in computer science at stanford at

the time, and they were working on a number of projects, but specifically, they were trying to figure out how best to make sense of the web. they essentially were trying to figure out what they did. they were inspired by a lot of work coming from library and information science, inspired by peer review. they were both academic kids. thaifer parents were both professors. they had this idea of peer review that a document of published work is valuable when the community of readers asserts it as valid and worthy of consideration. they took the hyperlink on the web, that kohl lored -- colored text that sends you to another page as a citation as a vote of affirmation, and that information they got from the institution helped us make sense of the web ultimately, and it was a tremendous revelation, and, you know, looking back on it you say, well, of course, that makes sense, but a lot of

people had been fumbling around with that notion for sometime. siva is a media studies and law professor at the university of virginia. his third book, i believe it is, is the googlization of everything and why we should worry, and we're talking with him at the virginia festival of the book. does google set its own rules? >> in a lot of ways, yes. google is not a completely deregulated institution. it still has to adhere to copy right around the world and censorship law, pornography and such around the world, it has deals with antitrust which is faces a lot of scrutiny with united states and europe. when it comes to most activities on the web, google is the one setting the standards for how we behave on the web and how the web behaves forwards us. there's no market in the world

that's truly free or institution that's truly deregulated, but google has a tremendous amount of atonmy. >> when you were writing this book, were the founders media friendly to you? >> i didn't even ask to speak to them, and there's a reason. their story is well-known. there's four or five outstanding books before mine telling of their rise, their success, and their fighting occasionally, and the effects they have on other businesses in the media world, so google is the best and most recent example. >> which they cooperated with. >> yes, they did. i didn't think i could do better at this particular approach, and so i took a very different approach. i wanted to look at what google means to you and me and how it effects us and how we effect google. it's not about google, but googlization, about the process of having so much information

rendered by google. within the book, i have to tell the story of how we got into the situation and thus the story of how google got into the situation, but i'm much more interested in the transaction, in other words, what we give to google in exchange for these amazing services that we pay nothing; right? so that, to me, is a much more fascinating story and how we were drawn into it and what the ramifications are. that's, to me, is where the action is rather than telling the heroic story of brilliant guys who become billionaires. lots of people told that story very well. even if i asked for access, i wouldn't get the time or have the skill set that others have, but i can go through and interpret the social science that's done on search engines, ask critical questions, keep enough of a distance that i can ask big questions. one the challenges of writing any book, my book is published by the university of california

press. there's a different role in the book ecosystem than others. the others are a trade book with a shelf life of 24 months of central relevance. in other words, after 24 months, the world he describes changing so much that it becomes a historical record and no longer part of the conversation. well, the university press book, the entire process is slower and the book should have more relevance down the line. it should never sell as many books up front as a trade book, but a longer curve, and ideally, i'd like the book to still matter in five years, the issues i raise to be relevant in five years, and if i've succeeded at that, then i managed to find my niche, but fundamentally, read my book if you want to understand your own relationship with google. read the others if you want to get as rich as the guys from google. >> your cover, did you have any

trademark issues with giewzing the colors and basically the logo? >> well, almost everybody else has used some variation of the google logo on their covers, and so we pretty much knew we wouldn't get in trouble for it. one, if they're going to pick on me and university of california press, then they have to pick on everyone. secondly, you know, google isn't a bully, and they are not petty. people at google are not petty. they knew, why mess with me? why mess with just an author? they have better things to worry about. trademark is interesting because in trademark, trademark lawyers of course are worried that there are images getting diluted if they circulate too strongly, but google itself has never been too hung up on that. a friend of mine wrote a book about scrabble and had tensions

over that sort of trademark representation, but really if it came down to the first amendment fight, the author and publisher wins, it's just a matter if it's worth having the fight. in my case, i was confident google would be cool and they are too far busy and cool to worry about me. >> what's a sismatic search? >> the holy grail of searches. they want to crack and what every science department dreams of as well. the notion if you get a set of the computers to react to human language like react to human language or simulate it. if you go to google now and say what is the capitol of idaho, the first answer is boise and comes up as just that, and the second answer is the wick peed ya entry, and then there's the boise chamber of commerce, but it does that because overtime

google learned from us when people type in that string of facts, they click on the answer, and so google simulates as if the computer actually understands that sentence in the english language a what is the capitol of idaho, but it doesn't. it's meeking a mathematical association, so it's sort of simulating sigh mat ticks in how the words work, but overtime with enough calculations and enough data fed into the system, the idea is that computers can do that for all sorts of questions, so you can actually ask what's the -- where's the best pizza in virginia? right now, if you ask that question, google's computers look for pages that have that string of text existing on a page which is very few pages. it will be an unsatisfying answer, whereas in the future, if google can train its

computers to understand what human beings mean when they ask that question, they might be able to predict the answer in a fluent way that convinces us that, you know, the computer is actually thinking in language. now, to do that, google needs more text than it has right now, more than all the gmail it has, more than all the web pages it copies and keeps in its system. this is one the reasons why google is interested in scanning in millions of books from the libraries because not only are they getting english language, but over 400 years of the use, and they get german, japanese, chinese, indonesian texts, and they are going to get a much better sense to crunch the data over time of how sentences work. the sentence is truly one the most amazing invention the human

beings came up with. it's a very efficient little machine that tells a lot of meaning and does a lot of flexible things, and it is so simple to us because we have been using it for song, like a shovel is simple to us, but a sentence is just mind blowing in its utility and elegance, right? so to a computer scientist or a linguist, a sentence is just this awesome algorithm, and getting a computer which is pretty dumb to do enough work to understand how it works, that would be the greatest leap ever. you might get into the nightmare situation is you get hell from 2001 space odyssey or hell understands what dave wants it to do, and then takes over its own agenda, but that's merely science fiction. the real goal here is to get the

sort of human computer interaction going so intuitively, more so than today, that we don't even have to think about the machines in our lives, but just as appendages of us. anybody who can do that has a major lead or really revolutionizing how we go about our business and daily life, and that's pretty profound. >> siva, if we look back in 5-10 years from now at the google books project, what will be in your view the most significant lasting aspect of that? >> so, yeah, google's been scanning in millions of books from dozens of libraries around the world since 2004, and at first it was going about it without permission and got into a lot of trouble and got in a major dispute with copy right holders, authors, and most publishers.

two years ago, google reached a settlement on a class action suit over the infringement, and that settlement is not yet proved by the federal court, and we don't know how that is going to go. in fact, waiting for that settlement to happen hung up this book for a long time. to me, that's the point in which the hubris of google becomes clear. >> hubris? >> yeah, the notion that -- google's mission statement is to organize the world's information and make it accessible which to me is a stunningly broad and am bish mission statement. i mean, who asked google? i kept asking when i read that the first time, at the time when google announced the project, it was six years old. it had been around for less time than brad pit and jennifer aniston were married at that time. think how well that went.

an ease steamed institution to be here nor years to come, it was letting this 6-year-old kid of a company be the custodian of thousands of years of knowledge. what an absurd situation. why isn't the university of michigan saying i'll take the lead. google, if you want to help, donate stuff, but it gave google the license to take control of the situation to dictate the priorities, to lie out the terms of the exchange, and through all of that troubled me in the process. we're at the situation now where the settlement might be approved. if so, google turns from what described originally as a library-based project into a bookstore, the world's largest used book bookstore and takes on a huge explicit store.

they could sell a lot of books through the google book search project, so there are so many things yet to be answered about thisment i'm not willing to predict because if the judge rejects the settlement, throws everything back to court, creates a meltdown, and that endangers the copy right system and how we use the web today and endawrnlg the very core mission of search engines if google loses the suit as i think it would, and that's dainches to me. if -- dangerous to me. if the judge approves the settlement, there's still big problems. none of the university libraries are isolated from liability in their participation. publishers and authors could sue the university libraries even though they can't sue google anymore. nothing about the settlement protects others from a lawsuit

from another country, and you have this highly commercial service that libraries are implicated in. neither one of the search engines scenarios is a good situation. what i want to see over the long term is for the libraries of the world to collaborate on a publicly funded and publicly designed system that does this job right, and not necessarily in a hurry. >> which is your human knowledge project? >> right. i call this the human knowledge project. i'm ripping off the human yes gnome project. again, late 20th century, there's this slow-moving, very di persed effort in a number of countries to catalog the human genome to get an idea how the material in our cells might work when turned on, and it requires a tremendous amount of information for scientists to figure out what each element of

the genome does or might do or could do over time. nothing is precise. the slow process was challenged by a company called solera, an upstart highly technical, highly ambitious, you know, full of hubris company saying we can do it cheaper, and you don't have the spend the public money on science. all we ask is that we set the terms of exchange, and that we take a piece of the back end when someone develops a pharmaceutical drug through the process, they get some licensing for it, so to a lot of people, that sounded like a great deal, but the scientists involved in this said, we can't have this level of privatization of essentially public information, and they started a political campaign to get a global coordinated effort, and they succeeded and ended up doing the project just as fast, so now we have both, the public project and solera.

they rely on both data bases and they are valuable. it's not an either/or question. it's a problem if the private sector drives everything and breathe relief that we don't have to take responsibility. i want to see a publicly funded global project working, maybe in collaboration or concert with google, but certainly not rely on this still very young addless sent company to do this tremendously important work. >> you open your book with a rather cryptic quote, and i'm going to read it." "it does not break wills, but bends them and forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one acting. it does not destroy. it prevents things from coming into being. it does not tyrannize, but

hinders." >> i mean, the representation of google. it crowds out other possibilities, our imagination, political will in a lot of areas. i think this is the example of the correction to that. at the time was writing about bureaucracy, and you could look at a big corporation of another form of bureaucracy, but it's important to take this as a warning because the book is an argument against the libertarian's position on how we deal with the interpret and the information ecosystem, but i wanted to qualify my own critique of the libertarian position by saying i also recognize that you can form bureaucracies that cause all other problems on the other side, and so i was happy to use the issues with bureaucracy to reflect both on my own argument,

essentially temper my own position and get us to worry a lot more about this new bureaucracy that we almost blindly allow to make important decisions for us. >> where did you learn to write? >> where did i learn to write? in a library. [laughter] i mean, i learned to write from some brilliant teachers in high school and went to high school near buffalo, new york, and then at the university of texas i was a reporter and became a professional journalist after that, and that just, you know, that got my -- that got my muscles built a bit, and once i moved into the scholarship to get the sense that whenever i write something, i'd like to be read, not have my work sit on a shelf for the edification of my own career, but rather have engaging in important public

discussions and i'd like my mom to understand what i write and so forth, so you know, i'm originally trained as a journalist, poorly trained nonetheless, it's what i did for the awhile, but i'm thoroughly happy with my position now as a teacher and a scholar, and it's given me great opportunities to talk about important issues with lots of smart people. >> what do you currently teach at the university of virginia? >> well, most of my job is teaching undergraduates about media, the changes in the media world: i teach a huge class called "introduction to digitallal media". there's 250 students in it, and we talk about big issues dealing with search engines and privacy and copy right and all of the things that worry us about digital communication, and i teach at the law school and seminars for law students. i don't have a law degree middle east, but i help them enrich the knowledge that they already have

about how -- >> things like copyrights? >> and privacy and internet law and letting them write papers about those issues. >> when we look back in 20 years at the current period, the late 90s and 00's, what will we say about the changing media environment? >> certainly we are going to understand that this was a time of flux, that there was a revolution going on, and that it -- we are currently in 2011 really at the beginning of it. we're all just babies when it comes to the changes in our lives that these technologies and these companies and services have brought us. we are only now beginning to realize the potential, and we are only now beginning to catalog the cost as well as the benefit. i think people are going to look back and be amazed at shallowness of the discussion,

so here's a shallow question. did social media effect the revolutions in north africa? well, yes, but that's not a question that reveals anything about how people actually work in the world, and in many ways, it reflects our own narcissism about technology, meaning those of us in the u.s. who mess around with this stuff all day. we want to believe that the technologies we use are deeply important in the world, and the thing i do six hours a day must matter in the world, and so some degree it reflects our narcissism to technology itself that it's tools changing people lives rather than here rowic brave human beings changing lives. i hope in 120 years there's people looking back saying we didn't discuss technology in the best ways, in the most high minded ways, and so -- but i do think that we're just at the beginning of trying to really make our way through it, and i'm

pretty confident we'll end up living much better lives. >> this is the book, "the googlization of everything and why we should worry." professor siva is the author. >> here's a look at upcoming book fairs and festivals around the country. this weekend in albany, new york is the empire state book festival. in new mexico, the book fair. starting on april 7, it's the arkansas literary festival. this week long event takes place in little rock. the border book festival in new mexico takes place april 8-10. next weekend, booktv is live from the annapolis book festival in maryland. on saturday, april 9, covering several events and the panels. is there a book festival near

you? e-mail us at booktv@c-span.org. you can also visit booktv.org for more upcoming book festivals. >> after 20 years of operation, the independent washington, d.c. bookstore politics and prose has been sold. we're taking this opportunity on booktv to talk with the new owner, formally owner of the "washington post". mr. grahm, congratulations to you. what made you buy an independent bookstore in 2011? on the phone: thank you very much. we are very excited about taking over as politics and prose and in author's case and former senior government staff member, we are very -- we are very

involved in contributing in various ways to the washington community, and we see this move to politics and prose as part of the same sort of thing, and it's another way for us to continue to contribute to the community. beyond that, we really believe in what the store's mission has been. you know, it's much more than a bookstore. it is a community institution. it is a forum for debate and discussion, and we are believing in the need for such forums. >> host: he's referring to his wife, also new cocorner of politics and prose. mr. graham, what changes do you think p and p needs to make in order to stay competitive? on the phone: you know, there's a lot about politics and prose that is very strong, and the

sales are very strong. there's a very loyal customer base, and it's at a time when the industry has been facing threats from e-books and declining readership, generally the sales at p and p continued to rise, so first and foremost, we want to preserve everything that has made politics and prose a success. that said, in order to remain relevant and influential and up to date, there's going to have to be some changes. carla and barbara recognized that over the years. the store evolved under their leadership, but just what additional directions alyssa and i want to move the store in is still formulating.

we are in the process of talking with the staff, getting their ideas. we want to survey an opinion of politics and prose customers, and so this will be an evolving process for us in terms of deciding, you know, what new directions and what initiatives to undertake. >> host: mr. foreman graham, when -- ! mr. graham, you visited other independent bookstores around the country. did you see any similarities? on the phone: i did. for all the disappearance of the number of stores in the industry over recent years, what's impressive about the business is that a number of bookstores have survived and remain strong, and i was interested in seeing why that is, so i visited a number of stores around the country, and i found some common threads. i found that those that are

continuing to succeed have very strong community roots. they have very dedicated owner and operators who are tried a number of different initiatives. i did not find that anybody anywhere has hit on a kind of home run solution to keeping their store successful. it's particular a matter to borrow a baseball analogy of hitting singles and doubles and getting on base, and in looking at politics and prose, i came away reassured that this store has many of the attributes for success that other stores around the country have particularly faced a large number of avid

readers and a great reputation with a lot of up realized value in it. >> now, barbara mead and the late cohn were good at the floor and booktv viewers went to p and p because they saw it on our channel come to visit politics and prose if they are washington touring, can they meet you and your wife? will you be on the floor? >> sure, sure. i intend to be at the store full time, but, you know, one of the other great strengths of politics and prose is its staff. we are inheriting a tremendously talented, very deep bench of experts about books of all kinds, and they have participated in introducing a number of authors, and they are the reason why so many customers

come to the store seeking their advice, and they will -- we are counting on many of them, if not all of them to remain and carry on. >> host: now, mr. graham, do you see a need for politics and prose to move into the selling of digital books? on the phone: we are looking at enhancing the website. i think that will be important. we realize the threat from e-books, but it's not not a threat we'll run away from. we are hoping to provide an opportunity for self-publishing, and we're looking at a printon demand machine like a number of other stores acquired around the country. there are a host of initiatives, i think, that you'll see beginning to take shape at politics and prose. >> host: well, bradly graham,

now co-owner as well as his wife of washington, d.c.'s poll sicks and prose, andbooktv looks forward to continuing our relationship with you. on the phone: we do too. thank you very much. >> i did take five years to write this as my wife repeatedly remind me. it's a labor of love and about the een deppic of the intelligence service, and a friend of mine went through this and told me about it, and when he -- he said, well, first, i got an e-mail and he said you have to write a book about the eis. i wrote back and said, thanks, andy, what's the eis? he told me it's the epidemic intelligence service. i thought, wow. this is nonfiction. there really is such a thing as the epidemic intelligence

service? it is. it's part of the cdc that began in 1951 in the middle -- and i'll show you the guy who started it. let me see, i think -- al exlander langer was the head epidemic epidemiologist at the center for disease control and it was the communicable disease center, the cdc. he had an idea to get young doctors out into the field immediately within 24 hours of being notified of an epidemic, bags packed, and ready to go. it sounded exciting, and it was exciting, but no one wanted to go into the field of health. nobody realized this was an interesting time. it appeared the new antibiotics would wipe out all the diseases, and there was more and more vaccines to deal with viruses. people said, alex, that's a

dying field. forget it. he said, no, i think you are wrong. he was correct. as you know, we have not got rid of all the microbes of the world, but he couldn't get anyone interested in joining the group because it was considered a dead end. fortunatelily, we were in the mid of the l korean war, and there was a doctor draft. the doctors didn't want to join the army, and when they joined the eis, it was an out. they spent two years in the program rather than two years in the military. when the doctor draft ended with the venal nawm war, it had become a well-known organization, and they didn't need the draft to get people into it. he was a bigger than life character. if you read the book, his daughter said when he walked into a room, that you could feel the room tip towards