Posted by shirley
on November 15, 2008
part 1
Session 2: Search Engines and Power
Theo Röhle – Dissecting the Gatekeepers
Theo Röhle is a PhD candidate in media culture at Hamburg University. His dissertation seeks to establish Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) and Foucauldian concepts of power within search engine research.
Where does the power of a search engine exist? One position of power is established in everyday discourse through images of anxiety and fear. Giving power a face however, tends to obscure the complex relations underlying it. As ANT suggests, there is no fixed source of power, just a temporary stabilization of a network.
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Posted by shirley
on November 15, 2008
Last Saturday, November 8, I had the pleasure of attending the well organized World-Information Institute conference Deep Search: The Digital Future of Finding Out in Vienna, Austria. With Deep Search, conference editors Konrad Becker and Felix Stalder set out to address the social and cultural dimension as well as the information politics and societal implications of search. An impressive line-up of eight speakers, divided over the sessions ‘Search Engines and Civil Liberties’, ‘Search Engines and Power’ and ‘Making Things Visible’, promised to make it an information-dense and interesting day.
As this will be a rather full report, I will post it in two parts. Be sure to keep an eye on the conference website, as the organizers promise to make a full video archive of the conference speeches available soon.
Keynotes
Paul Duguid - The World According to Grep: Both Sides of the Search Revolution
After a timely start and a word of welcome, Konrad Becker introduced the first speaker of the event: Paul Duguid, former consultant at Xerox PARC (1989-2001) and author of The Social Life of Information (Harvard Business School Press, 2000). Currently, Duguid teaches History of Information and Quality of Information at the University of California in Berkeley.
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