In Google We Trust:
the predictive promises of Google Now
‘With the predictive power of Now you get just what you need to know, right when you need it’
(Google Now, 2014).
‘They know I’m on campus, but I mean they got that wrong as well… I think like I’d trust them to be able to do more than that… I mean like with all the information and like algorithms and whatever they have, I wouldn’t assume them to get it wrong’
(Lisa, in focus group, 2014).
Part I
Introduction: the information you need before you even ask
This chapter is the last of three to focus on a specific site of investigation that explores how individuals engage with and negotiate contemporary algorithmic personalisation practices. The site of investigation focuses on ‘digital personal assistant’ Google Now (Google Now, 2014) as an example of algorithmic personalisation. The chapter draws on the accounts of six Google Now users who were interviewed four times over the space of six weeks, and so the study differs from the previous two in that it was designed to capture participants’ sustained yet developing engagement with an example of a technology that heavily relies on algorithmic personalisation. The chapter is structured around the themes that emerged as part of the study.
These themes include; participants’ framing of the app as ‘smart’ and ‘impressive’ even as the app failed to be ‘useful’; participants’ invocation of self-blame in order to explain the app’s failures; their faith that Google would uphold its side in the data-for-services exchange that has arisen at points in this thesis; and finally, participants’ expectations that the app could and should know them, anticipate them and personalise for them to an extraordinarily complex degree. Furthermore, this chapter proposes that Google Now’s interface and algorithmic protocols construct and evoke an ideologically normative ‘ideal user’ in order to present
‘personalised’ information. These themes come together to produce what I define as an
enduring sense of ‘trust’ that these participants bestowed not only in the app itself, but in Google as a broader technological, socio-cultural and commercial force.
It is important to note that all participants in this study were ‘freshers’ – first year undergraduate students enrolled in a digital media studies module. As such this study is underpinned by a methodology that seeks to acknowledge and build on these participants’
simultaneous development as Google Now users and as developing media studies scholars, to explore the ways that their critical skills intersect with their sustained engagements with this personalisation app.
The former title quote above is taken from the launch video accompanying the roll-out of Google’s newest search engine manifestation: Google Now, a component of the Google Search mobile app and ‘intelligent personal assistant’ designed to feed users ‘information that is relevant to them’ (Google, 2104) as and when they need it. Google Now promises to
algorithmically deliver this information in ‘one simple swipe’, offering to the user ‘cards’
containing the information that Google has deemed worthy of need ‘throughout their day’ – such as commute times from ‘home’ to ‘work’, traffic and location updates, TV and movie recommendations, ‘photo spots nearby’ and stocks, sports, flights and weather data.69 As the quote suggests, unlike the established Google Search widely used in computers browsers throughout the world, Google Now promises frictionless, pre-emptive information retrieval that supposedly circumvents the need to actively input a search query in order to receive
‘relevant’ information – an apparently now unnecessary moment of user-initiated action upon which Google Search has conventionally had to rely. As Chapter Two explored, contemporary digital assistants such as Google Now claim to assist users by offering an efficient and
convenient information management service that imbues the system with some autonomous
69 These cards are structured to correspond to the following categories: Birthdays, Events Nearby, Flights, Gmail, Movies, New Releases, News Updates, Next Appointment, Photo spot, Places, Public Alerts, Public Transport, Topic updates, TV & Video, Sports, Stocks, Traffic, Travel, Weather and Website Updates (see figures 8-12 for examples).
decision-making capacities. In encompassing these decision-making capacities, Google Now presents the development of a new (if somewhat flawed, as this chapter explores) stage towards pre-emptive, personalised information retrieval wherein, in the company’s own words, Google can now ‘give you the information you need throughout your day, before you even ask’ (Google, 2014, my emphasis).
Google’s predictive promise is at face-value a neat rhetorical tagline designed to appeal to busy mobile users ‘on the go’ (according to the study’s participants at least, as I shall explore).
However the statement also exemplifies Google’s long-standing conceptual ideal; that is, to
‘know’ a user’s needs, desires and ‘intentions’ (Jarrett, 2014: 17) in order to provide the most efficient and convenient forms of search retrieval. As I will explore shortly, scholars such as Hillis, Petit and Jarrett (2013), Jarrett (2014) and Campanelli (2014) have noted that this conceptual ideal gives rise to a host of potentially profound philosophical, theoretical and socio-political implications for the users aggregated and constructed by this recursive system.
Google Now’s ‘predictive powers’ (Google Now, 2014) also signify an important shift in terms of the human/ non-human agency model with which it has previously operated, wherein the autonomy usually afforded to the user in searching for ‘relevant’ information is instead afforded to the app; making Google Now an exemplary form of algorithmic personalisation.
This shift raises a range of critical questions relevant to this thesis; what does it mean to attempt to realise the task of giving a user ‘what they want’, ‘before they even ask’? What forms – and formats – of information does Google Now deem worthy of personal ‘need’ to any given user’s everyday trajectory? How does that user negotiate, appropriate and understand this apparently necessary information? In what ways, if any, is the user’s lived experience informed, altered, and even constructed by the pre-emptive inferred ‘experience’ that Google Now attempts to map onto an individuals’ daily lived trajectory? This chapter draws on the accounts of six Google Now users, who engaged with the app over the space of six weeks, to explore these users’ engagements with the app’s ‘predictive powers’ (Google Now, 2014).
Theorising Google’s pre-emptive vision
In attempting to give its users what they need before they even ask, Google Now signifies an important step closer to Google co-founder’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin conceptual ideal; that is, to deliver to users a kind of frictionless search mechanism in which a user’s informational needs and desires can be met without any labour on the user’s part. In 2004 Brin envisioned:
Right now you go into your computer and type a phrase, but you can imagine that it could be easier in the future, that you can have just devices you talk into, or you can have computers that pay attention to what’s going on around them and suggest useful information (2004, cited in Levy, 2011: 67).
Brin and Page’s ‘dream’ of designing a system with the user’s wants and needs in mind was not a concept unique to them – as Oudshoorn, Rommes and Stienstra note, the late 1980s marked a shift in ‘the paradigm in design theory’ away from ‘technology-oriented design’ and towards
‘user-oriented design’ (2004: 30). Brin and Page’s ideal thus follows a dominant belief of the time in that user-oriented design approaches placed users’ needs, interests and intentions at the heart of the design process. However, as Oudshoorn, Rommes and Stienstra (2004) and other design theorists such as Law have noted, this emphasis on user-oriented design can be
problematised by design structures and processes that ‘configure the user’ (Law, 1991) through assumed ideological norms that constructed an ‘imagined’ user. Implicit in these structures was a user assumed to be ‘everybody’ but that in reality reflected and maintained pre-existed socio-cultural assumptions that the ideal user was white, male, and middle class. In other words, through this normative design process ‘technologies become adjusted to certain groups of users and not to others’ (Oudshoorn, Rommes and Stienstra 2004: 32), whilst even as this process is assumed to be ‘designed for all’ (2004: 30).
As I will explore in the latter sections of this chapter, such ideological assumptions of the
‘ideal user’ can very much be applied to Google Now’s interface. Here however it is important to note that though Brin and Page’s dream of user pre-emption in some ways followed dominant paradigms of centred design, their concept also marks a departure from
user-oriented design in that rather than a human-led design process configuring the user, in their predictive ideal the user is instead configured through a process of algorithmic inference;70 the user could be ‘known’ and catered for through data tracking and algorithmic mechanisms.
Campanelli identifies this shift towards Google’s pre-emptive search mechanisms at work in Google’s autocomplete function and in Google Now:
Google Now.... uses the potentialities of the most popular search engine, along with localization and access to personal user data, to automatically offer
information and news about the context in which one is situated. The idea is that such tools, which automatically organize the information we need, ‘free’ us, as they allow us to focus on what’s important to us. Such a view implies that, according to Google, information selection should not be considered a core activity in the lives of human beings, but a burden that one may well leave to machines and their algorithms (2014: 43).
The ‘unburdening’ of informational decision-making to personalisation algorithms thus takes on a problematic status – that is, though the ‘outsourcing’ of this decision-marking process might be time-saving for the user, Campanelli notes that such outsourcing works to undermine user control and autonomy. As Hillis, Petit and Jarrett (2013) acknowledge, this kind of
imagined computational information retrieval system implies that ‘achieving perfect relevance would be akin to the technology seeming to read one’s mind’ (2013: 55). These theorisations help to highlight that the conveniences of pre-emptive search come with the disconcerting possibility that such a system actually ‘promises a limited form of virtual sovereignty’ (Hillis, Petit and Jarrett, 2013: 22), wherein the searcher and search system become blurred and even unified. Thus, as explored in Chapter Two, Google’s pre-emptive search systems open up the possibilities that algorithmic personalisation might create a struggle for autonomy between user and system even as it purports to ‘aid’ users.
70 Manovich’s (2013) work suggests that this process again is not specific to Google; he notes that since the 1990s, the computational form rather than the user has been increasingly awarded control over the decision-making and interaction processes build into computational architectures.
Jarrett notes that in order to provide pre-emptive search, Google must attempt to collect and amass a ‘database of [user] intention’ (2014: 17) – that is, ‘a massive clickstream database of desires, needs, wants, and preferences that can be discovered, subpoenaed, archived, tracked and exploited for all sorts of ends’ (industry analyst John Battelle, cited in Jarrett 2014: 17). Jarrett argues that this database of intention could theoretically lead to a situation in which the ‘algorithmic identity’ that Google constructs for each user
effectively shapes and regulates the web experience of the identity that it is supposed to simply reflect. She writes:
In [Google’s pre-emptive] mechanisms, the intentions ascribed to me are fed back to me, working to inform my ongoing search articulations. A feedback loop emerges in which presumptions about activity, based on Google’s assumptions about users’ intentions, go on to inform a user’s experience of, although not necessarily their engagement with, the web (2014: 23).
Thus these kinds of predictive search strategies do not simply attempt to ‘read one’s mind’;
they hold the potential to inform and even construct the subjectivity that they are supposedly only ‘reading’. With Google Now however, this feedback loop – and its consequences – extend beyond the ‘web’ to the domain of everyday life. After all, the predictive promises of Google Now do not just look to provide pre-emptive search, they also look to pre-empt a user’s commute to work, their dinner plans, their evening’s TV schedule, and their trajectories around their (commercial) local environment.
Jarrett recognises that these user ‘intentions’ – the affective, conscious and unconscious driving force embedded in every user search query – can at once be easily commoditised by Google but also are always forever unknowable. She writes:
If Google can still be called a database of intentions, it is only of extensive manifestations – the textual, cognitive, discursive trace of digital archives….
Google cannot actually capture the meaningful, inalienable aspects of my
intention. These cannot be alienated from me. They cannot be expropriated from me (2014: 22).
Jarrett notes however that though Google’s goal to capture user intentions is ultimately unreachable, its attempt to do so has material socio-economic effects; she states that ‘once alienated, my intentions have the power to act upon me, autonomously of my desires, meanings or interests’ (2014: 19).
It is not only Google’s pre-emptive search mechanisms that have attracted scholarly attention.
As scholars such as Beck et al (2011), Van Couvering (2007), Andrejevic (2013) and
Vaidhynathan (2011) note, the increasing ‘Googlization of our lives’ (Vaidhynathan, 2011) – the ubiquitous, deceptively neutral and socio-culturally integral place that Google currently holds in contemporary information societies – has been subject to much academic critique. As scholars such as Hillis, Petit and Jarrett (2013) have noted, part of Google Search’s current popularity and market dominance can be afforded to the fact that most web users feel that Google Search is simply convenient and efficient. In the age of ‘infoglut’ (Andrejevic, 2013) Google has provided web users with a welcome solution to this problem of seemingly infinite information overload.
By offering respite from this infoglut Hillis, Petit and Jarrett argue that Google has been elevated in popular discourses surrounding informational retrieval to the supreme status of a kind of ‘divine mind’ (Hillis, Petit and Jarrett, 2013), infallibly capable of finding, organising, managing and filtering what the user ‘wants’ amidst this sea of (dis)information. The treating of these seemingly omnipotent automated technologies as ‘god-like’ is not exclusive to search engines – as Noy’s (2015) work on ‘drone metaphysics’ highlights, automated technologies such as drones are afforded by political advocates and in popular discourses an almost divine status that fetishises the external and unknowable forces that appear to lie behind automated and autonomous technologies (2015: 16). Furthermore, as Burns (2015) notes and as I will further explore, this ‘faith’ in media technologies – despite the limited affordances of developing technologies (such as Google Now) – allows users to discursively ‘redraw the
boundaries’ (2015: 9) of faulty objects to retain their faith in that object. I will be drawing on some of these scholars throughout this chapter, as well as the work of Livingstone (2014), De Certeau (2002) and Lapenta and Jørgensen (2015) to attempt to take into account the lived experiences of Google Now users whilst analysing Google as a socio-technical force and actor.
Method: project design
Reported usage of Google Now is fairly widespread: the app boasts over 1 billion potential
‘active users’ worldwide on Android phones alone (Techcrunch, 2014).71 After initial activation of the app, any user-initiated customisation of the app is minimal72 – the user can customise content if they wish, but Google Now will attempt to infer information about the users’
everyday trajectory regardless of whether they choose to input data explicitly (for example their home address), or confirm the accuracy of the Google Now’s predictions (for example by confirming that Google Now has correctly inferred their home address). This study sought not to engage Google Now users as a representable population, but to consider the experiences of a small number of individual users through an in-depth – loosely ethnographic – but certainly highly qualitative methodological approach.
All participants of the ‘Google Now research project’ (as the project was labelled during participant recruitment) were recruited from a Digital Media Studies module at a UK university. These individuals were invited to participate on the grounds that they did not necessarily identify as ‘Google Now users’ – unlike the self-identified Ghostery users or Facebook app users who participated in the other two studies that constitute the sites of
71 Figure based on ‘current Android activations’ of Google Now over a 30-day period (Techcrunch, 2014). However, some of these billion users might only be using the app to perform more ‘traditional’ user-initiated Google Searches rather than using the predictive search functions, as these two forms of search are standalone features in the app.
Though the one billion figure is therefore questionable, the potential number of users using Google Now’s predictive functions is very high.
72 Explicit engagement with the app is especially minimal for Android users, who will find the Google Search app already preloaded onto their mobile when they purchase their phone. All Android users have to do to use Google Now is ‘activate’ it. For iPhone users, initial installation is slightly less ‘frictionless’ – they must download the app from the iTunes app store.
investigation for this thesis. By asking students – some of whom had never before used the app – to participate, this study hoped to capture the engagements of potential non-users of an algorithmic personalisation practice. As Baumer et al. note the ‘non-user’ – that is, ‘a particular individual or group of individuals…. [who] are unable or choose not to use some specific technology or technological system’ (2015: 2) – is perhaps the most elusive mode of socio-technical subjectivity to identify and theorise, yet ‘focusing explicitly on non-use can function as a dialectic manoeuvre, an inversion that provides a novel perspective on, and potentially fuller understanding of, the complex, multifaceted relations among society and technology’
(2015: 2). Though two participants had limited interaction with the app prior to the study, and all participants did end up ‘using’ Google Now as part of the study, I believe the study touches upon this notion of ‘non-use’ since the participants were consistently disappointed that they could not find a ‘use’ for Google Now, as I will explore.
All participants were students entering their first term of their first year at university. Their enrolment as Digital Media Studies students raised a number of methodological considerations;
the most pressing being that the content of their Media Studies module – which covered topics such as online privacy, search engine politics and even the socio-political implications of personalisation – was likely to inform and effect participant engagements with Google Now, and their interview responses. To account for this, the study was conducted in the first few weeks of the students’ first term at university.73 However, as I will further explore, the mutual development of students’ critical learning with their use of the app transpired to be valuable site of exploration in terms of their engagement with Google Now; that is, participants’
development of ‘expertise’ intersected in a number of nuanced, reflexive and yet often contradictory ways with their engagement with the app.
All in all, six participants took part in the full study, who attended four interview sessions over the space of six weeks (please see Appendix A for study timetable)
.
Though at first I intended all participants to be grouped into focus groups, a number of volunteers dropped out before the first session and so final interview dynamics were structured as follows:All in all, six participants took part in the full study, who attended four interview sessions over the space of six weeks (please see Appendix A for study timetable)