Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

Act I: The Sunday Times casts out the link bait with "Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches". To stir up the bottom feeders it adds the subhead: "Physicist Alex Wissner-Gross says that performing two Google searches uses up as much energy as boiling the kettle for a cup of tea".

Act II: All around the world, robots eagerly lap it up and France's Le Monde trots out "Une recherche Google a un coût... énergétique" (A Google search has a cost ... energy) on Monday. Yesterday, Germany's Focus came up with "Klimakiller Google?"

Act III: That cautious Focus question mark was prompted by Jason Kincaid's damning Monday post at TechCrunch: "Revealed: The Times Made Up That Stuff About Google And The Tea Kettles".

Act IV: Caught in the act, red of face, hand in the cookie jar, pockets full of porkies, the Times reacts in the lamest way imaginable with "Google's response to Sunday Times story about its search and greenhouse gases".

Act V: On Monday, Jay Rosen points out that, "In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized — meaning they were connected 'up' to Big Media but not across to each other. But today one of the biggest factors changing our world is the falling cost for like-minded people to locate each other, share information, trade impressions and realize their number."

If the press thinks that it can still get away with publishing propaganda or making up stories about Google, it is scarily unaware of the enormous power now in the hands of active media consumers, who are not shy about doing a little Fisking. By the way, Jay Rosen's post is titled "Audience Atomization Overcome: Why the Internet Weakens the Authority of the Press". Last Sunday, the press, writing about the internet, used the internet to undermine its own authority and the internet was then used to expose this recklessness. If that doesn't say something about where we are today, I'll eat my trousers.