In early 2003, the phrase “Second Superpower” became a popular way to refer to the street protests against the imminent invasion of Iraq. The metaphor had been used by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and on the cover of The Nation magazine. A small number of techno utopian webloggers hijacked the phrase.
The narrower sense sprung from a paper by a technocratic management consultant Jim Moore, who referred to direct democracy mediated through technology. It belongs to the school of literature in which the Internet is the manifestation of a “hive mind”. Only a few links from weblogs were sufficient to send the paper to the top of Google’s search results for the phrase “second superpower”.
In the New York Times, UC Stanford Linguistics professor Geoffrey Nunberg, wrote:
“Sometimes, though, the deliberations of the collective mind seem to come up short. Take Mr. Moore’s use of “second superpower” to refer to the Internet community. Not long ago, an article on the British technology site The Register accused Mr. Moore of “googlewashing” that expression – in effect, hijacking the expression and giving it a new meaning. The outcomes of Google’s popularity contests can be useful to know, but it’s a mistake to believe they reflect the consensus of the ‘Internet community’, whatever that might be, or to think of the Web as a single vast colloquy – the picture that’s implicit in all the talk of the Internet as a ‘digital commons’ or ‘collective mind’.
While in Le Monde, Pierre Lazuly observed:
When you search the net you are not examining all available knowledge, but only what contributors – universities, institutions, the media, individuals – have chosen to make freely available, at least temporarily. The quality of it is essential to the relevance of the results.” Lazuly drew attention’s to Google’s description of its algorithms as “uniquely democratic”:
“It’s a strange democracy where the voting rights of those in a position of influence are so much greater than those of new arrivals. ”
Lazuly concluded –
“Those who got there first in net use are now so well-established that they enjoy a level of representation out of proportion to their real importance. The quantity of links they maintain (especially through the mainly US phenomenon of webloggers) mathematically give them control of what Google thinks.”
Webloggers had enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with Google. The dense interlinking between weblogs gave them a higher ranking in Google’s search results. This had not been written about before, and they didn’t like it one bit.
Search engine expert Gary Stock described it:
“[Google] didn’t foresee a tightly-bound body of wirers, They presumed that technicians at USC would link to the best papers from MIT, to the best local sites from a land trust or a river study – rather than a clique, a small group of people writing about each other constantly. They obviously bump the rankings system in a way for which it wasn’t prepared.”
“Each of us gets vote,” jokes Stock. “And someone votes every day and I vote once every four years.”
The act of being observed changes everything. As Slate‘s Paul Boutin concluded:
“Bloggers determined to prove they can be just as clueless and backbiting as the professional journalists they deride scored a major milestone this week …”
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