As we were discussing the possible reasons for the wild success of March of the Penguins, one student noted that, whatever else might be true, it was hard to escape the fact that penguins were just pretty darn popular on their own – in fact a number of students mentioned that they never miss the penguin exhibit at the zoo, and some even made sure it was their first stop. This surprised me, because I’d obviously missed out on the fact that penguins are a kind of glamour species, just like dolphins, or orcas, or elephants, or wolves. But once the students pointed it out I’ve begun seeing them everywhere (certainly the Madagascar penguins are a big hit with my pre-schooler who I think secretly wants to be the Skipper). If you want to see some now, you can, thanks to the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Live Penguin Cam. But my sharp-eyed students pelted me with one penguin pop icon after another, including, of course for the web savvy, the Linux penguin. Want to see 16 pages of penguins courtesy of lwn.net, a linux news site? Sure you do.
The Linux penguin got me thinking about the vogue for silly, whimsical, cute and cuddly logos for information technology firms. An overfed penguin is an obvious kind of "hey, we’re just a bunch of fun guys having a fun time" kind of image (no intimidating geometric holograms for us!). With Yahoo! you’ve got the name itself and the cereal-box typeface (and the hip counter-hip shtick of the hillbilly yell on their television commercials), that ridiculous pudgy guy in the butterfly suit for Microsoft – Richard Bray, a Microsoft vp called him "fun, friendly, and approachable" – and the oversized primary-colored google logo, with its ever-changing holiday doodles, as another example of charming, child-like un-design.
These zippy little funster symbols are meant to offset the intimidating cast that information technology can conjure up for the digitally indifferent, and probably do a good job at that. The cheerful little google logo on my search toolbar certainly conjures up a pleasant enough response when I look at it . . . until recently, that is, with the news that google has agreed to take over censorship duties from the Chinese government by agreeing in its search results for Chinese users to block content that Beijing deems unacceptable, so that google can tap into the enormous potential that the Chinese market represents. What on a pop culture level can suggest fun, friendly, and approachable can obscure more complex and difficult issues.
A lot of folks say that google’s moves are not a very big deal (although, for a corporation that sold its image on the slogan of "do no evil" it is at least disconcerting) – Chinese users know that their government censors things, and thus what google is doing is par for the course, while still delivering them better service than they’ve had with indigenous search engines. There is also the fact that "everyone" is doing it – that is, all the big US info tech companies are involved one way or another with the Chinese government and "the Great Firewall," and so that’s just the business reality in today’s world . . . and Yahoo! reportedly has turned in two dissidents to the government, so what google is doing is not that bad, comparatively. Like many areas of multi-national trade, the politics and economics rarely reduce to simple dichotomies of good or bad (or, to take google’s own terms, of "evil" and "not evil").
But I can’t shake an historical analogy from my head, from an episode we covered in my "Science, Technology, and Politics: International Perspectives" class, when we looked at an earlier era in information technology management: the rise of the Hollerith sorting machines that enabled massive number-crunching for such complex tasks as the U.S. census. This question becomes enormously significant in regard to Germany in the era of the Third Reich, as detailed for example in Gotz Aly and Karl Heinz Roth's The Nazi Census: Identification and Control in the Third Reich and Edwin Black in IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation. Black, in particular, raises disturbing questions about IBM founder and chairman Thomas Watson’s decision to allow IBM’s data processing machines to service the goals of the Hitler regime in order to maintain IBM’s strategic position in the German market (apparently even after the U.S. entered the war).
The circulation of information is serious business. It may be easy to calculate profits and losses from the point of view of the dollar or the yuan (aka as the renminbi), but it is much harder to calculate profits and losses in terms of the ramifications of restricting the free flow of information. In the end, I guess it makes me uneasy when an American corporation chooses to restrict or monitor information at the behest of a non-democratic regime -- at the very least I figure a repressive government should have to devote its own time and resources to restricting liberty, rather than outsourcing the project to Americans. And crayon box-colored logos with holiday themed cartoon pictures don’t make that feeling go away. . . which means I’m in the market for a new search engine, whether it comes bundled with a cute and cuddly image or not. ( I only hope that it doesn't turn out that the penguin is just a decoy and it is Linux that is really responsible for global warming . . . )
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For more: wikipedia offers a tour of penguins in popular culture and imdb.com has viewer responses and more for March of the Penguins. On "fun" info tech images, some just don't work -- doesn't everyone hate Clippy, the Microsoft Office animated paperclip "helper"? He got the heave-ho in Windows XP. Further perspectives on google and China can be found in a PBS NewsHour interview with Rebecca MacKinnon, a former Beijing Bureau Chief for CNN and a Fellow at the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard, and in an opinion piece entitled "Search Engine Diplomacy" by Adam L. Penenberg, assistant director of the business and economic reporting program at NYU's Department of Journalism.
Image: A Linux penguin made out of LEGOs, by Eric Harshbarger, image located at http://www.ericharshbarger.org/lego/penguin.html