Google Docs

 I've been thinking about this a lot over the years, but the rise of Google Docs (everything else about the company aside) has really contributed to making things incredibly accessible. It's so easy to put together a document with important resources and things like that and just make it publicly available.

Think about how many Google Docs you've used recently. I've used it for sharing documents at work. I've also used it to create documents that give advice to organizations on how to run events and collect institutional knowledge. I've also seen so many people collect lists of links and share them that way. You can find free pdfs of textbooks and other artistic works through Google Docs. I've seen people conduct research surveys through Google Forms! 

What's miraculous about this is that Google is a really shitty company. Probably all of the information that we're sending to them through these files is going to come back to bite us. But somehow all of the bad press tends to go to Google as a search engine, rather than using Gmail or Drive or anything else.

Somehow this tech giant has made things super duper accessible, anyone with an Internet connection can access Google Drive and see all of these files. All you need is a Gmail account to get access. Not going to lie, I got a Gmail when I graduated undergrad just so that I could take advantage of how easy it is to upload and share files through Google Docs. 

I can't quite tell whether this is a trend and things are going to continue to be so open or if the other shoe will drop soon and we'll have to pay for this. As far as I can tell, this is an innovation that hasn't gathered a ton of press, not many people are writing about Google Docs as a platform. But knowing Google, something is going to happen to monetize this at some point. 

I sure hope that isn't going to happen! But you cannot guarantee anything in this day and age.