Peter Gallagher

A _zeitgeist_ is a spirit of the times. “Google”:http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist2005.html can, prob­a­bly, pre­tend to mea­sure it, at least for a large pro­por­tion of peo­ple in Europe, the Amer­i­cas and parts of Asia using the sub­ject of queries to it’s data­bases as a proxy. But oddly, they chooseonly to _pretend_ to tell us what it is. For an infor­ma­tion util­ity, Google is very fru­gal with infor­ma­tion. Google claims bq. It turns out that look­ing at the aggre­ga­tion of bil­lions of search queries peo­ple type into Google reveals some­thing about our curios­ity, our thirst for news, and per­haps even our desires. (“Google Press Cen­ter: Zeitgeist”:http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist2005.html) Well … maybe. In fact the data on indi­vid­ual searches tell us only about behav­iors dur­ing the year: this isn’t so much _zeitgeist_ as a snap­shot of pop­u­lar his­tory. I would say that a _zeitgeist_ is, among other things, the addic­tion to celebrity: Google says it’s the wed­ding of Charles Wind­sor and the other woman—which is at best an inad­ver­tent synec­doche and at worst an intel­lec­tual fraud. I don’t believe, of course, that there’s any­thing actu­ally fraud­u­lent in the Google report: the ‘zeit­geist’ site is an amuse­ment, not a soci­ol­ogy paper. But the graphs that it offers for selected queries such as “Lon­don” (the bomb­ings) or “Jen and Brad” (celebrity divorce) are, nev­er­the­less, mis­lead­ing because they are *with­out scale*. At most they tell us that there was a spike in some unknown mag­ni­tude of inter­est before and after the event they pre­sum­ably illus­trate. But with­out scale we *can’t com­pare the rel­a­tive inter­est* in Angelina Jolie, Martha Stew­art and Car­di­nal Ratzinger (for exam­ple). We don’t know if they fig­ure more or less in the pop­u­lar imag­i­na­tion nor whether Jolie’s adop­tion of a child is more fas­ci­nat­ing than Ratzinger’s assump­tion of the Triple Crown. That _relativity_ comes much closer to fig­ur­ing the _zeitgeist_ than the rel­a­tiv­ity of inter­est in a par­tic­u­lar phe­nom­e­non or per­son before and after their (lat­est) moment of fame or infamy. But Google, for rea­sons we can only spec­u­late about, choses to *keep that more use­ful infor­ma­tion to itself*.