(Another heartbreaking work of staggering genius?)
edit: Yes, it's pretty transparently a reference to Google. Zings sound more like tweets, though. And monitoring everything has turned out to be primarily the NSA's job, but I guess he finished the book before that scandal came to real light.
I don't see how your parent made the transition from modernized 1984 (which was very astute IMO) to Google. This to me is a critique of corporate culture, and, perhaps more than anything of Silicon Valley culture.
Seems to me the author did a good job of keeping the text open, the comment field is rife with personal bias and it took me two iterations to get rid of the knee-jerk Google defense.
Apart from the hardware, it could be Facebook, too. And, surely, it could be Microsoft, in a few years time.
"Zing" is a beautiful term, by the way. It resembles 'to sing' (especially for those who speak Dutch), with all its positive correlations. And, of course, the name is taken; both zing.com and zing.nl exist.
So "zing" is both the kind of term that COULD be taken over by a social media service (like "tweet" has been taken over), and at the same time is a negative commentary on what you're actually doing when you use that social media service.
I assume that that was the meaning intended, since the author is writing in English.
Neil Postman compares them: http://www.prosebeforehos.com/image-of-the-day/08/24/huxley-...