Google doodles aren’t just naff – they’re trying to rebrand the past

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/14/google-doodles

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This probably marks me down for instant refusal when Google upgrades us all to cyborgs, but Google doodles really rub me up the wrong way. The company started taking doodles seriously enough to design them in-house 15 years ago today, when intern Dennis Hwang – who later became “chief doodler” – whipped one up for Bastille day 2000. I wish he hadn’t.

It’s not just that the doodle, the corporate-branding equivalent of dress-down Friday, has that naff novelty air about it: all those cute animated Thanksgiving turkeys, faux silent films and puzzle-piece Nietzsches. Or even that, presumably driven in part by Google employees’ hobby horses (“How about Giambattista Tiepolo’s 318th birthday?”), they feel like textbook “wackaging”; the ingratiating, infantilising tone that has been smeared all over marketing for the past decade. It’s that behind the fun is something more pernicious: by weaving historic and cultural milestones into its logo, Google is trying to retroactively brand the whole of human progress – perhaps the very notion of progress – as its own.

The doodles – flitting through the highlights reel – encourage the idea that data, readily accessed, is all history is

Oh look: those ubiquitous six letters tossed around Saul Bass’s iconic Anatomy of a Murder cut-up, twisted into Watson and Crick’s double-helix, brass-embossed like Galileo’s telescope. Google is photobombing history on a grand scale; Photoshopping itself into the edited snapshots of homo sapiens’ march out of monkeydom at a time when, through its Tomorrow’s World laboratory Google X, it’s also laying strong claims to our future.

But aren’t Google doodles educational, too, I hear you say. Would many people be thinking about 10th-century mathematician Abu al-Wafa al-Buzjani, and his trigonometrical genius, or the marvels of the Lascaux caves otherwise? Like so much altruistic spiel, that line would be so much easier to swallow without the vein of self-interest, and in this case the shouty visual branding, running through it. A doodle-less homepage might be more boring, but I’d feel more reassured that Google’s aims were more pedagogical than proselytising if it could find a way of flagging up anniversaries and cultural waypoints that didn’t involve splicing them with its own logo.

In one sense, Google is the current lease-holder of this vast historical acreage, in that it is all now accumulated data made accessible by its search engine. But the doodles – flippantly flitting through the highlights reel – encourage the idea that data, readily accessed, is all history is. An unbroken line of progress leading to Google. It somehow flattens out the true terrain of the past, shrouded in unrecorded emotions, and the crooked nature of progress, continually following, straying from, being misled by and refinding the paths of the forebears. You can of course burrow into the inner struggles of history’s innovators – not to mention all the countless Salieris, nearly-men and no-marks who propped them up – all you want on the internet, via Google. But such complexities are quite a few clicks removed from a Google-sponsored, pixelated ZX Spectrum/St George’s day mashup.

The doodles are a benign version of what the powerful have always done: co-opted the past for marketing purposes, like every second-rate Hellenic strongman claiming he was the new Alexander or Achilles. But then their main line of business wasn’t information. Google stands a better chance of being the gateway to the future if it recognises that no one has ever held a monopoly on progress, and stops trying to rebrand the past.