Digital Rorschach
I was talking to a Cuban acquaintance in Ponce the other day who, much to my surprise, actually believed that Google made money by personal profiling and selling the collected information to telemarketers. Heh? Come again? It is particularly striking that even after 100 years of a relationship to the United States, there still exist so much misunderstanding with the Latin American culture (or variants thereof). A small time schemer might be doing this, but institutions that extend so broadly into society cannot, as it would destroy and gravely undermine the social fabric--which unfortunately has repeatedly occurred in so many parts of the Caribbean during that last century. Google and its founders, needless to say, are not small time schemers but 'visionaries'. Remember the internet before Google? Quite frankly, it was a jungle of junk where nothing relevant to what one was looking for could be found. Google in a very real sense organized and gave coherence to the Internet, therefore providing a genuine service to internet users in the US as well as throughout the entire world. But, you might ask, how does Google make its vast quantities of money, given that you don't see advertisements on its main search page? Well, it is relatively simple--but you will have to find out for yourself. They say that all mutual understanding can only come from looking without and within.