A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Google, the Skanky Cookie Monster

When I decided to start blogging, writing essays on various subjects in various shapes and sizes on the World Wide Web in 2011, I chose to go with Blogger instead of WordPress. Blogger, which went online in 1999 and was purchased by Google in 2003, and WordPress, which was founded in 2003, were the only two blog sites I was familiar with at the time and sad to say I chose Blogger not for political or economic reasons but for cultural reasons. I preferred its look to that of WordPress. Yes, like all humans I too can sometimes be shallow.

I still don’t know much about WordPress and how it works since I don’t use it. But I do know something about Blogger and knowledge as it sometimes does, has tarnished the aesthetic sheen and the reputation of this blog site for me.

 In the last couple of months the sheen has really began to wear off gilded Blogger for me. Google now requires, when I upload an image from my computer on to Blogger, that I allow them to use cookies, tracking cookies, in order to access and utilise information about me that they can presumably pass on (Google as Big Big Big Big Brother) and sell (Google as Big Big Big Big Corporation) to interested others. That is, after all, one of the ways that Google makes money and like many global postmodern megacorporations these days they will use every means, regardless of how small and seemingly petty, to make monies. 

And this is just one of the reasons why Google is one of the several skamky cookie monsters we sadly have to live with today. Beware of the skanky cookie monster whose ABC’s are actually dollar signs, pound signs, and Euro signs. The World According to Mammon.