Why not online civic monuments?

A national online library? If its Google’s, it isn’t even a comprise of corporate America anymore, is it? Can we say proprietary? This AP article, “Scanning world’s every book means turning many, many pages” includes the phrase “books to be included in Google Inc.’s Book Search, a portal …to all the estimated 50 million to 100 million books in the world.” That doesn’t sound theoretical to me; it’s the marriage of capitalism – that “Inc.” and the hubris are inescapable – with the world’s published history and the more I reflect on it and ideas I heard at a talk a year ago, the more I think it’s a civic shame of monumental proportions.

It’s not Google’s’ fault and it’s not libraries’ fault; it’s a failure of national civic leadership and imagination on every level in preserving for SOCIETY and presenting to the world our very heritage said Dr. Siva Vaidhyanathan of New York University on February 22, 2007 in a talk entitled Libraries and Copyright: Hands Off, That’s Mine! Who Owns What, and for How Long?, part of the Boston Athenaeum’s bicentennial lecture series. Civic values got the Boston Public Library built – and filled – and then mimicked throughout America, including a splendid Italianate version in Providence, Rhode Island where I spent many hours during high school. And so what if the BPL’s location served the upper class more ideally than the working classes scattered elsewhere in the city. It was something for all of us to aspire to collectively. Corporate America’s robber barons idealized and then built CIVIC America.

That’s what we really need now in the online world. Civic, not corporate monuments. And it could be done on the cheap, too. Google’s exercise thumbs its nose at the thoroughgoing impoverishment of American society: see what a billion or two could have accomplished if only WE – all of us together – had had the vision. Reminds me of a line I’ve seen in the trailer for Charlie Wilson’s War that could be said of American society: “And you ain’t no Thomas Jefferson, so let’s call it even.” It’s been a long slide into the corporate ether.