Gauls search for Net engine
Having intermittently over two decades railed against American movies, music and TV shows and their widespread popularity, they've now turned their attention to that latest instrument of alleged Yank domination -- Google.
Their beef is with the search engine's ubiquitous popularity in cyber cafes across Europe, and what has particularly alarmed the Gauls is Google's pronouncement that it intends to put 150 million English-language texts online in the next few years, and earmark some $200 million to do so.
Naturally the French consider that tantamount to the throwdown of a gauntlet, and countered by saying they intend to rev up their own search engines and put more French material online. Their goal is to scan texts and visuals gathering dust in places like the august Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, though their outlays for such undertakings are likely to be a pittance compared to Google's.
Not that the French don't have a point.
How information is ranked, linked and made accessible to searchers on the Web now determines how culture is parsed and how mindsets, especially young ones, are formed. Search, in our Internet-dependent age, is becoming as basic a human urge as food or sex.
Just a simple exercise on the computer that considers only the linguistic origin of information suggests an Anglo worldview of things, even French things, is more likely to be the primary vantage point encountered by someone looking up, well, anything. (The Internet itself is largely an Anglo invention, as were most of those who added information in its early years.)
Type in "French Revolution" and some 10 million hits pop up in less than a second, the top 10 naturally in English, from mostly English sources; set the preference button on Google for "sources only in French" and type in "la revolution francaise" and 9,330 page hits pop up, the first 10 mostly from sources within France.
Similarly disproportionate amounts of information are accessed typing other French icons -- Edith Piaf, Francois Truffaut, French cooking -- even French kiss. You get the idea.
The French never managed to limit the dissemination of American series and movies around the world -- local audiences themselves determined they prefer locally produced TV shows, but U.S. movies still dominate the wickets most everywhere. Moreover, a French round-the-clock newsie emulating CNN has yet to get off the ground. It must, however, be especially, well, galling not to have a Google equivalent in France.
After all, this is the country of Descartian logic, not to mention a wealth of printed texts that goes back to the Middle Ages. It's also a place where government control is prized above commercial imperative.
Former Vivendi Universal topper Jean-Marie Messier famously dismissed the so-called French "cultural exception" as dead, but he clearly got that, as so much else, wrong.
Pundits in Le Monde are once again proclaiming that marketing clout and consumer demand (the things Yanks are reputedly so good at) should not trump artistic taste and cultural sophistication (the things the French excel at).
Unfortunately, being late to the game in a world of ever-quicker clicks, and trying to exercise control over the board, makes winning that much more difficult.
