Google was founded on the 4th September 1998 in California by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. in the first instance, Google began as a search engine, but now, the company has expanded into much more. For example, the creation of mobile phones, the new trend of "Google Home", much like Alexa, speakers, headphones and many more products. This can be an example of how companies expend and become one of the leading and most popular brands used by people today. It can also show and reinforce the idea that the media is controlled by a small number of big companies. This can be particularly seen by the fact that Google is a hugely influential company, with a big presence on social media presence. This can extend as far as people using the word "Google" to refer to any search engine, with the common phrase "Google it". Furthermore, other popular and leading companies that people may reference are owned by Google, for instance, YouTube. This further reinforces the idea that large companies often take up a lot of social media, making the media homogeneous. The impact of this is huge as this can restrict the representations of different groups in the media, making people feel alienated.
Moreover, the release of these products (Google Home, mobile phones etc.) makes the industry extremely similar, meaning that there is no longer any originality, as each product seems to be a copy of a copy. This can relate to Baudrillard's theory of the lack of originality in the media currently. As well as this, the big companies that are leading the industry are often deemed to be driven by profit, taking away from the ideologies that the company held when they were a smaller brand. This also means that most of the types of media we use are owned by Google in a media conglomerate.
