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December 31, 2007

Norman Mailer On Google

Norman Mailer died at 84 this year, only months after the publication of his latest book, On God, a brilliant dialogue about God and Good and Evil.

Before Mailer passed away, I planned to interview him about Google and God and whether corporate technology in any human hands can Do No Evil.

Mailer was not a search engine expert. Nor was he a technologist. He was fearless, though.

As a towering literary figure, he took center stage in some of the great debates of the 20th Century. He refused to go quietly when the novel and the printed word lost prominence with the advent of film, television and the Internet.

His personal theology as outlined in On God provides a foundation for understanding technology and its influence on society. If there's sufficient interest among Search Engine Watch readers, we'll revisit the controversial New York Times column by Thomas Friedman, entitled "Is Google God?"

I'll excerpt Mailer's published views on technology and God. I'll try to persuade his co-author, Mike Lennon, to join the Google debate on Mailer's behalf.

Now that Google has won FTC approval of its DoubleClick acquisition, Search Engine Watch will keep an eye on the ways Google dominates the Internet, the search engnine marketing profession, and our professional as well as "private" lives.

We won't have Norman Mailer's wisdom and literary journalism to guide us, but we will have his words and his example.

Posted by Kevin Heisler on December 31, 2007 2:24 PM