The Year According to Zeitgeist
by Jennifer Altavilla
Barack Obama may have won the election, but Google's year-end Zeitgeist report suggests that the U.S. - and the rest of the world - still can't get enough of Sarah Palin. Enough people love her (or love to hate her) that Governor Palin is the fastest rising global search in the world, and the top U.S. search on Google Images and Google News. Not surprisingly, Obama was the most popular overall search in the U.S., but he was only sixth on the list for fastest-rising searches worldwide.
For the past eight Decembers, Google has organized the millions of search queries it receives every day into an annual report of the hottest political, cultural, and intellectual trends. Businesspeople use the Zeitgeist, which means "spirit of the age" in German, to predict economic trends; media moguls use it to gauge what the new hit television genre will be. Others use it to create trivia questions for their next cocktail party.
Whatever its purpose, Google's Zeitgeist reveals a great deal about the interests and habits of our internet-dependent society. The list of the top five fastest-rising global searches (determined by their growth from 2007) was rounded out by Beijing 2008 at number two, followed by Facebook, Tuenti - a Spanish networking site - and Heath Ledger. It is not surprising that Beijing 2008 ranked second, considering the Olympics is a worldwide event. But how did Sarah Palin-who one year ago was hunting moose and quietly governing the geographically large, yet politically inconsequential, state of Alaska-beat out a global sports competition? It just goes to show how seriously the rest of the world takes American politics. Or how universally ridiculous and entertaining Palin is.
It is also no surprise that Facebook hovered near the top of the list for fastest rising searches, considering that high school and college students spend more time editing their Facebook profiles than they do writing papers and doing homework. In fact, Facebook-the third fastest-rising search in 2007 as well-was the top search in the United Kingdom and the second most-popular search in the United States behind Obama.
But what does it say about modern society if a social networking site is one of the most popular internet searches in the world? Is it healthy that people feel such an urge to be "logged in" at every waking moment, that they feel the need to share all of their personal information? The internet was created with the intention of being a place where people could find and share intellectual capital, not "profile pictures" and "wall posts." Now a social gathering place and an information forum, the internet has changed the face of communication. People can arrange parties on Facebook, break up with boyfriends and girlfriends on Facebook, share inside jokes on Facebook. But are people really connected? What is connection without human-to-human contact, without seeing smiles, feeling caresses, and hearing laughs? Seeing "LOL" on my Facebook wall doesn’t make me feel connected to anyone.
Google's Zeitgeist teaches us more than what we search for on the internet. It teaches us how the internet has become not just a source for political and pop culture information, but a basis for society and friendship. We don't log on to revel in the latest mishaps of Sarah Palin, or read about the untimely death of Heath Ledger. We log on to be a part of a worldwide social network where we can share our thoughts about Palin or Ledger. Contributing to comment pages and posting in chat rooms and on Facebook walls makes us feel important and makes us feel like we are making a contribution to society, no matter how insignificant.
The fact that the Zeitgeist exists at all is a testament to the power of the internet. As a society we want to know what other people are searching for in order to see whether we are in tune with the hottest cultural phenomena. Our thought process when glancing through Zeitgeist probably goes something like this: I didn't search for latest updates on the iPhone this year-I am obviously out of touch with the trends, since it was fourth on the list of hottest U.S. searches. I've never heard of the Jonas Brothers-and they were tenth on the list of fastest-rising global searches! I must have been living under a rock last year. Unfortunately, we care about how well we know the trends and fashions of our age. But we should care more about what those fads say about our society. I don't know about you, but I don't want to go down in history as part of the Facebook and Sarah Palin generation.
