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Googling a Problem about Google

Guest blog by Lady A. (a real name, I swear) and Ariel B. sorta.

Consider this: Google chrome crashes. You have a question about Google Mail, Google Calendar, etc. The immediate online resources is Google! Google, by virtue of being everyone’s go-to for the answers to all questions must necessarily be meta.

Indeed, google is so meta, that it uses meta tags, HTML or XHTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a Web page (google referred me to Wikipedia for this one).

Metadata is data about data, and is also known as metalanguage. This is trippy. Basically, google can be at once self-referential and hetero-referential. In fact, when you google something, you are not searching the web, but are searching googles index of the web.

Therefore, googling, regardless of what you’re googling, can put you in some sort of mise en abyme, and subsequently drive you to further googling, which is just another word for procrastination, which may be the antidote to metaness....

Editor's note: I don't understand why google is hetero-referential, but ok. Who am I to censor?

Comments

  1. SLApril 20, 2011 at 1:37 PM

    It's also meta that I had to "google image search" the word google to get the pic above.

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownApril 20, 2011 at 2:50 PM

    Suz, I just googled your name. Which means that one can google googlers googling google's "Google."

    ReplyDelete
  3. SLApril 20, 2011 at 6:32 PM

    that's beyond meta. that's absurd

    ReplyDelete

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