Google(Earth)

How does Google's Earth Day doodle show the relationship between (wo)man, nature, and technology?

Like housing projects named for features they displaced 'Fox Run' 'Oak Knoll' 'Falcon Ridge' (this article mocks this approach in Denver), Google's cyber nature passes easily for cute celebration of nature, but of course when we watch this, we're very much NOT watching any actual birds or beetles as your Vine videos suggested.

In the animation for Earth Day, Google creates a few small creatures, hummingbird, dung beetle, puffer fish, jelly fish, that turn and float and flutter. The pair of shivering monkeys seem different from the rest, staring out at us from their double oo station, the place all these cartoons are integrated into the name.  They're rendered in anthropomporphized letter O's subordinate to the all encompassing often dancing word Google. How many of you regularly click on the animation?  How many minutes have you passed idly watching this? How many human years have passed similarly? At what cost? 

In The Circle, Eggers opposes the utopia of the Googleplex corporate campus with kayaking on SF bay or later on Mae's boyfriend's off-the-grid hideout. Yet the real place we experience Google is on the screen, increasingly in all our screens as Google grows ubiquitous. And don't get me wrong, I appreciate their work. I hate using email programs that don't let you easily embed links or pictures. Their products are so intuitive they feel....ummm.....natural. On the screen, as we search, Google greets us daily with a cute, clever, animated version of their name created just for that day.  Each day they greet us with a combination of puzzle, cartoon, and lesson.

And the word Google- do you know the original meaning before it became a company and then a verb?  It meant 10 to the 100th power, or more colloquially an incomprehensibly large quantity. An apt name, certainly, perhaps because of the incomprehensible encroachment it represents on our time and because of the way technology continues to replace the natural world in our lives, even as it evokes it like those awkwardly named housing developments.