The Epic of Googlezon
It's the year 2014 and the New York Times has been reduced to a print-only newsletter for the elite and elderly. Its demise was heralded by Googlezon, which resulted from the merger of Google and Amazon in 2008. Two years later, the News Wars began. "Googlezon's computers construct news stories dynamically, stripping sentences and facts from all content sources and recombining them. The computer writes a news story for every user." The Fourth Estate made its final stand when The New York Times Company sued Googlezon, claiming that the company's fact-stripping robots were a violation of copyright law. The US Supreme Court decided in favour of Googlezon on 4 August 2011.
On Sunday, 9 March 2014 Googlezon unleashes EPIC: "The Evolving Personalized Information Construct is the system by which our sprawling, chaotic mediascape is filtered, ordered and delivered. Everyone contributes now — from blog entries, to phone-cam images, to video reports, to full investigations. Many people get paid too — a tiny cut of Googlezon's immense advertising revenue, proportional to the popularity of their contributions."
Googlezon is a creation of Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson. They've made an eight-minute Flash documentary about the rise of the Big-Brotherish EPIC and it can be viewed at the "Museum of Media History". What a clever logo they've come with for EPIC, eh? Note the reflected image of Pi. If you would prefer a summary of the film, pop along to Masternewmedia and it's there. Robin Good is predicting that the coming generation of "newsmasters" who'll serve EPIC "will be the most sought-after and highly rewarded professional media creators the world has ever seen." Can't wait for 2014 to roll around.
