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Reader question: What is "necessary evil"?
My comments:
Evil but
necessary is the short answer.
"Necessary evil" is a phrase best used in paradoxical situations where
you find something unpleasant (evil) but necessary (something you have to
do or accept in order to achieve what you want).
In a Guardian column (Newspapers and search, March 13, 2006), for
instance, Jeff Jarvis called Google "something between a necessary evil
and a friend". Evil, in the sense that Google excerpts newspapers' content
on its pages "and making money there". Necessary because without Google,
the most visible news organizations just won't be, well, so visible.
Jarvis wrote:
"The World Association of Newspapers is portraying Google
as an enemy of news. I wouldn't say that. I'd call Google something
between a necessary evil and a friend - and if news organizations are
smart, they will learn how to befriend the beast. The Paris-based WAN,
which represents 72 national newspaper associations, has joined with a
posse of 11 European publishing groups to seek help from the EU and to
threaten legal action against Google for excerpting members' content on
its pages and making money there. One publisher calls this 'stealing',
another 'napsterisation'. They are not alone in their fear, resentment and
digital cluelessness. Agence France Presse sued Google to try to stop it
from quoting the wire service's content. American book publishers are also
trying to stop Google from indexing their text.
"At this month's Online
Publishers Association conference in London, WAN managing director Ali
Rahnema asked: 'Could this content exist if someone else wasn't paying to
create it?' Well, in the quaint Americanism of my hillbilly roots, I'd say
Rahnema got this bassackwards. Instead, we soon will be asking, 'Could
this content exist if someone else wasn't linking to it?'
"The truth is
that today, Google is every site's front page. If you can't find content
via searches, or via aggregators such as GoogleNews and Digg.com, or via
links from blogs, then the content and the brand behind it might as well
not exist. This is how online sites get traffic. This is the means of
distributing your content online. If you don't like it, there are easy
ways to stop it: you can place a file on your website to tell Google and
other robots to stay away, or you can put your content behind a
registration or pay wall. But to cut yourself off from search and links is
like taking your paper off the newsstand and making people go out of their
way to find it. What sane publisher would do that?
"Sane publishers
are, instead, engaging in the black art of the age: 'search-engine
optimization' (SEO), which means making your content easily findable via
Google and company. I am a believer. Full disclosures: I work with the New
York Times Company's About.com, which has become a top-10 site via SEO. It
is a wonder. I am also working with a startup that, not unlike Google,
organizes news, because I believe this will help bring readers to relevant
reporting. And I advise newspapers that all their content - including
their archives - should be online, for every search engine, aggregator and
blog to find."
You get the idea.
Mark Twain once said that "work is a necessary evil to be avoided." I'm
sure that's correct, but if you're a beginner on a job, you must be
careful if you want to follow Twain to a T.
Twain, you see, was lucky - He didn't have a real job. He as a writer
did not have to sit the regular office hours, come to all the time-wasting
meetings and generally put himself under the mercy of bosses, naming but a
few "evils" at the office.
He wrote for a living. And he probably would have called writing "a
labor of love" instead.
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