After fighting the Nazis, George W. Bush and bad cuisine, the French are ready to take on the real enemy: Google.
It appears that Jacques Chirac is thoroughly displeased with what he considers but the latest parry in the onslaught of American hegemony -- what the French call omnigooglization. Last week, the French president got together will some of his cronies -- Culture Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, and the head of France's Bibliotheque Nationale, Jean-Noel Jeanneney -- to discuss how a new tide of American imperialism could be turned back.
Why all the sudden fuss? The French are offended that Google is attempting to do doing something cultural. The search engine giant has recently teamed up with several of the English-speaking world's greatest book repositories -- Oxford, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan and the New York Public Library -- in an effort to make the world's greatest literature available online. To this, the French government cries, "J'accuse!" Or, to put it in terms that we Anglo-Americans will understand, "Help! Help! We're being repressed!"
I'm not blindly anti-French, but this is ridiculous.
When Google announced its plan, Jeanneney wrote an epistle to Le Monde, calling the endeavor "confirmation of the risk of crushing American domination in the way future generations conceive the world." He also told Chirac last Wednesday that he believed Google's project would demonstrate preferential bias toward "Anglo-Saxon" literature. Such literature -- which of course would include works like The Scarlet Pimpernel and A Tale of Two Cities -- would reflect poorly upon French history, he claims. In addition, it seems the French government assumes Google will somehow selectively ignore the countless volumes of French and foreign literature in American and British libraries.
In an effort to thwart the plans of Anglo-American tyranny run amok, Chirac announced plans to construct a rival French search engine as a "counter-offensive" to growing American oppression, something like the small-scale Gallica project that has already put thousands of French works online.
But there are problems with Chirac's plan. For one, Google has approximately $200 million at its disposal to accomplish its mission. The French government, however, does not readily have such funds and will be forced to appeal to its taxpayers of other European countries.
The most troubling problem, however, is ideological in nature. Minister Donnedieu also threw in his two ducats' worth about omnigooglization, saying that Google's method of ranking search results by user popularity is disgraceful and reflective of an "American system" of commercial capitalism. The alternative? Jeanneney proposes a "committee of experts" who will determine which Web sites have more substantive value than others. The prospect of Jerry Lewis sites at the top of every result list is horrifiant.
It's not clear how these "arbiters of good taste" will go about ranking Web sites, especially since there are well over eight billion of them in existence. Regardless, any ranking system based on criteria other than popularity will be fraught with implicit sociocultural value judgments that will be inconsistent at best, extremist at worst.
Historically, the French have gone out of their way to preserve their self-perceived cultural superiority. For example, the Academie Francaise, which has had a vise-grip on the French language since the 17th century, has stricken such American cyber-jive as spam and bug from the lingua franca, replacing them with arrosage and bogue. This is all while preserving the linguistic integrity of words like douche and menage a trois.
This French faux pas is easy to dissect. First, Chirac is plainly wasting his time. Doesn't he have better things to do than battle Google? Second, Google's book project is admirable; it's not some Anglo-Saxon scheme for cultural domination. It's not clear that Google's project wouldn't include large numbers of French texts. Even if it didn't, I doubt French culture would be in danger of fading into obscurity. Third, the French plan can't prohibit access to Google, and the French to continue to use in anyway. Finally, commissioning "experts" to judge and rank the merit of free-flowing information is inherently dangerous and is itself more repressive than any possible American influence.
It's perfectly understandable that the French would want to preserve their truely praiseworthy culture against increasing globalization -- we all would to some extent. They are, however, not only over-reacting, but also going about preservation in a fashion that's only going to make them the butt of jokes.
Already, the world is laughing at France's expense. A Google search for "french military victories," now returns an imposter Web site asking if the user meant to type "french military defeats."
Let's all hope for the sake of freedom of information and the moderation of France's cultural ego that the French government will say au revoir to its own ill-conceived project before this becomes yet one more defeat.
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