Communication, like banking, is predicated on trust. When trust is breached, the system fails. The safekeeping and efficient commerce of trust determine the robustness of the house, the reliability of the system, even in matters of nuance and degree. The trust that differentiates reportage, advertising, and propaganda, is relative in the same sense that risk is relative in various forms of investment. When a high-risk investment, however, is presented as a secure loan, this is a breach of trust that jeopardizes the integrity of the bank. This breach may trigger a bank run and potential collapse, reflecting large scale distrust among depositors. The same is true with matters of communication.
Three headlines in this morning’s news serve as reminders of the issue: (1) From Wired: IPad Apps Could Put Apple in Charge of the News. This is a mildly hysterical piece, (which leads me to distrust Wired as being aligned with Google), suggesting that Apple would use its platform to act as censor. (2) From Mashable: Facebook Secures Patent for News Feed. Implications remain unknown, but the headline is not an understatement. We are talking about the news feed, which in principle now belongs to a relatively untested protector of the world-wide late-breaking. (3) From Forbes: Google And The Law. On the heels of the widely publicized ruling in an Italian court to hold Google executives personally accountable for users’ content uploaded to YouTube, the issue of web openness vs. censorship is debated.
What each of these three headlines highlights is that the Internet and its principal hubs are maturing and no longer mere youthful distractions. Even in matters of personal media consumption or utilization, (i.e., the social web), which will not necessarily shake up the newswires, the issues of trust, security, and integrity, cannot be ignored. In some ways, these issues play an even more important role in the social web, in which personal sensitivity is at stake. And when media companies begin to dabble in news (reportage), commercial media (advertising), and private communication, simultaneously, the risks and sensitivities are not dissimilar to those of universal banking that becomes active in everything from checking accounts to emerging markets hedge funds to private equity to sub-prime credit derivatives. The entire house is vulnerable to the point of highest risk.
Case study in real-time: Google and its vulnerability to Buzz. Should we begin to distrust Google on account of its lax rollout of a social product that mishandled our personal information, should Google be moreover perceived as insensitive to such issues, then this matter of breached trust can quickly extend to other parts of the enterprise. Google Docs and Google Apps, for example, both predicated on the upload of private documents into Google’s cloud, could lose credibility. But this would be a minor thing, because it wouldn’t hit Google where it hurts most: Search. Producing almost 100% of its profits, this product, which is really an advertising directory, is entirely dependent on our continued trust that results are wholesome and precise.
So, when in the aftermath of the Buzz fiasco we begin to see articles like this one, and blogs like this other, highlighting the enormous complexity and sophistication of Google’s search foundation, and the meticulous seriousness with which the company treats this engine, we recognize the propaganda’s motive. If Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, can fall, then Google may not be immune. At the very least, market share may be lost, and chunks of stock price. And if Google is not immune, there are much lesser houses at risk. The Internet is no longer a toy, and the stakes are grown-up stakes now.
