Personal document: google is your friend

   The document below is a music video about Google created by two young brothers named Antonius and Vijay, also known as the AVByte brothers. They regularly post Broadway musical style songs about various topics on their channel AVByte (many of them internet related) and this is one of them. It was published in March 2013, one month before the official launching of the Google glass in the United States. The two composers and video makers, seen as they make a living out of YouTube which is powered by Google, are Google and more generally internet and technology friendly. It was then only logical for them to make a video like this one, about the Google search engine (not the whole multinational). 

   The video is built around six main characters, or more specifically singers, who are all supposed to be one of the six Google letters and wear a T-shirt with the corresponding colour. Then they also play the part of random internet users along with four other characters who appear more shortly. It all happens in one setting, an office that fictitiously could be a Google office or its headquarters. It can be seen as Google talking to us from home. The first 12 seconds are an introduction where they explain that when you are desperately  looking  for an answer, the best place to go to is Google. Then we can hear the chorus completing that idea and insisting on the fact that it is efficient and simple to use. The verses are structured around a series of examples of dumb doubts ("when is the fourth of July?", "If you want to mail a baby but you're worried it'll die") followed by the way you can find an answer to it on Google. They make references to popular culture featuring Slender or some wizard wanting to attend Hogwarts. The orchestration and the six singers have the typical feel of Broadway musicals, with a strong wind section, a syncopated rhythm and clear, vibrant loud voices.

   The message they try to convey is clear and simple, Google has made our life easier and has brought knowledge and skill closer to us. They want to insist on how efficient and fast a platform it is. One particular line is important "With Google by your side there's not a thing you can't achieve". It shows that it brings you the opportunity to easily find information, tips, and official websites for places or many other things. With Google we can't say we couldn't find the way, but they don't say "won't", for it obviously depends on each of us and not Google if we do succeed in the end. The dumb questions can be seen in two ways. Apart from making us laugh they could mean that Google can be an antidote to human stupidity: they will soon learn that Hogwarts is a fiction and that mailing babies is equally lethal and illegal. It can also be a little thought about the downsides in the sea of positive aspects intending to say that in all the years that Google has been around people have by no means become smarter. Generally though, what they say is that Google is a great tool for anything you need or want to do.

   The video is very skilfully made and carefully thought out. The vocals, the composition and orchestration show hard work and musical knowledge, the shooting and editing are good too and the image and sound qualities are very high. Obviously, as the song praises Google, it gives a very biased point of view and shows only a part of what Google actually is, forgetting many downsides. I agree with the positive aspects they give but I also think that we need to be really aware that Google classifies the websites based on popularity and not reliability. We can easily end up in front of information that is inexact or even completely false. Also because search engines make information so easy and fast to access , young people become lazy when it comes to actually learning the information they find online because if they need it again "one search will do the deed". They could be criticizing that with the dumb doubts and they also mention it in the questions afterwards but it's not clear enough. We are also losing the habit of searching in books, but it's sometimes necessary for specific information we won't find elsewhere. Also Slender's question "How do you make friends" is something the internet cannot give a full answer to. Google is still a brilliant tool if we use it in a careful and responsible way.

   In the description of the video, its authors mention the Google Glass, and that is because the Google Corporation is indeed not limited to the search engine but has more than twenty other services and websites of its own (Google+, Gmail, Maps, Hangouts...) that make it the giant multinational it is nowadays. Some of them are more used than others but they all aim to simplify our lives. So we could also ask ourselves, this time regarding the whole corporation, to what extent Google is our friend.