Most Important Corporation

Commenting further on a part of a discussion we had in class about Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows, I do not think that Google is the most important corporation that exists today. Yes, many people would say that Google has improved our lives greatly. It has definitely made internet surfing a lot easier, and there are many applications of Google that improve our experience on the internet. Yet I believe that there are much more important corporations existing today that we rely on way more often than we do Google. In my opinion, we do not need Google to survive.

I would consider Google basically the center of the internet, or the main part. It is the most widely used search engine and it is generally people’s starting point when they go onto the Net. Although I don’t believe it is the most important corporation today, there are many benefits of it. For example, the internet obviously existed before, but there was no place you could go to to search for websites. You basically had to know the URL of a certain website and that was that. Now, we can search a keyword or question and different websites will be listed that involve those keywords, almost instantaneously. Google makes it so easy to discover other websites and find answers online. If we didn’t have it, we would have to ask around for the names of websites that might be helpful. Also, Google has many convenient applications like News, Maps, and Books. These are only a few of many. With News, we didn’t have to be near a television to know what was going on around us and our world. Maps made it capable to get directions to an address without asking someone how to get there. Books made it possible to read a novel online instead of having to buy the hardcopy. As you can see, Google has improved our internet experience and made things possible that were unheard of in earlier times.  Although I believe this, I definitely don’t think that Google is the most important corporation and for many reasons.

                I think that corporations like that of oil, food, carpentry, electricity, or clothing, are much more important than Google. We do not need Google to exist because we could definitely survive without it, just like we did before it was invented.  Some organizations like carpentry or construction, that make houses and buildings, are much more important. Most of us need shelter and insulation to survive if we live in a climate with extremely cold winters. This is much more important than a search engine. Also, without oil companies or engineering corporations, we would not be able to travel by plane or car, and life would be extremely simple, only being able to stay around our town or house. For example, what if there was an emergency and we needed to go to a hospital? An ambulance would not exist for us to be taken there quickly. There are many more examples I could speak of about these corporations that are more important than a search engine, but I think the rest are pretty self-explanatory.

-Jill Zalewski