Gossip networksA B C D E F G H IJKL M N O P R S T U VXYZWagreeing to conform to the Internet censorship
requirements of the Chinese government. A
‘cyber-attack’ in December 2009, suspected
as coming from within China and targeting
Google’s Chinese Gmail accounts, particularly
those of human rights activists, proved the trig-
ger for Google to threaten to pull out of China,
even at the prospect of the loss of a vastly lucra-
tive market.
David Drummond, corporate development
and chief legal offi cer of the company, in a Google
blog (12 January 2010) wrote, ‘We have decided
we are no longer willing to continue censoring
our results on Google.cn ... we will be discussing
with the Chinese government the basis on which
we could operate an unfiltered search engine
within the law, if at all ...’ Th e Chinese govern-
ment renewed Google’s licence to operate in
the summer of 2010, though in the view of Ted
Dean of a Beijing-based company and reported
by BBC New Business (9 July 2010), ‘many of the
issues around why Google shut down its Chinese
search page in the fi rst place are still there’.
▶Randall Ross, Planet Google: One Company’s Auda-
cious Plan to Organize Everything We Know (Free
Press, 2008).
Gossip Traditionally gossip has been ranked as
‘woman’s-talk’ and, within discourses and
social structures that are male-dominated,
given low status in the order of exchange, or
even disparaged. Gossip, to outsiders, usually
male, appears to be ‘going nowhere’, ‘undirected’
and ultimately pointless if not damaging. Such
judgments are essentially made from ideological
positions which view communication as less an
exchange of experience (a cultural exchange)
and more a transmission of information: in
short, ‘man’s talk’.
Gossip deserves more serious attention than is
usually given to it. In ‘Gossip: notes on women’s
oral culture’ in Women’s Studies International
Quarterly, 3 (1980), Deborah Jones defines
gossip as ‘a way of talking between women in
their roles as women, intimate in style, personal
and domestic in topic and setting, a female
cultural event which springs from and perpetu-
ates the restrictions of the female role, but also
gives the comfort of validation’. Jones lists four
functions of gossip: house-talk, scandal, bitching
and chatting. Such talk establishes and confi rms
the pleasures of interaction while at the same
time working to give them value and validity. As
such, it is potentially empowering.
Gossip networks A mode of resistance, by
women, to male-dominated discourses. Th e
term is used by Mary Ellen Brown in Soap Operacomputer-science graduate students Larry Page
and Sergei Brin in 1995 and launched in 1997,
Google experienced almost instant and expo-
nential growth, by 2000 becoming the world’s
largest search engine. The original name was
BackRub. ‘Googal’ is a mathematical term coined
by Milton Sirotta, nephew of the US mathemati-
cian Edward Kasner, for the number represented
by 1 followed by 100 zeros; thus a ‘google’ stood
for an extremely large number, refl ecting the new
company’s ambition to provide vast amounts of
information on the World Wide Web.
A cheque for US 100,000 from Sun Micro-
systems founder Andy Bechtolsheim made
the launch of Google possible in 1998. One is
tempted to say, ‘And the rest is history.’ Google
now runs in exess of 150 million information
searches a day. Shortly after its launch, Google
was chosen by AOL (American On Line)/
Netscape as their web search service, traffic
levels having risen to over 3 million.
In June 2000 the company entered into
partnership with Yahoo! Growth was dynamic
and brilliantly innovative. Image Search was
launched in 2001 to be followed by G News
(2002), a content-targeted advertising service
(March 2003), Google Print and Google Book
Search in the same year. In 2004 the launch of
Orkut enabled Google to tap into the sphere of
social networking (see networking: social
networking). Google Local followed, and also
in 2004 users could begin keying into Google
SMS (Short Message Service), Desktop Search
and Google Scholar. There followed Google
Maps, My Search Engine, Blogger Mobile,
Mobile Websearch, Google Earth, Google
Talk, Google Reader, Google Analytics, Gmail
for Mobiles (2005), Google News for Mobiles,
Google Finance, Google Trends, Google Check-
out – all in the same year that Google acquired
YouTube (2006).
Lateral thinking has been no stranger to
Google: in 2009 the YouTube Symphony Orches-
tra played at New York’s Carnegie Hall. All the
way, Google has accumulated businesses such
as Keyhole (2004), a digital mapping company
whose technology proved the foundation for
Google Earth. Others followed: Doubleclick
(2008), reCAPTCHA (2009), Aardvark, Picnik,
ITA, Slide and Widevine (2010). Acquisitions
represented both Google’s development needs
and their perceived direction; for example,
Widevine was a vendor of digital rights manage-
ment software, enabling broadcasters to safely
transmit video content online.
Google came in for widespread criticism in