Week Nine Weblog

Indexes, Algorithms, Ranking, Oh my!

It is obvious to me, after reading Nissenbaum & Introna's article Shaping the Web: Why the Politics of Search Engines Matters that the only real way to ensure that the original vision of the internet as a democratizing force is to expose the methods and algorithms that are search engine foundations. This type of policy, which is suggested by the article itself, would allow users to have much more meaningful results when searching for information and/or work around/with the biases inherent to the search engine. More importantly, it would allow for an increase of types of algorithms and ranking systems that would be more representative of an author's social, political and moral persuasions. Understanding this would allow for a user to decide whether or not to continue using that particular system or to find/author a different one that is more aligned with his/her inquiries.

Suppose that this ideal exists and then try to imagine what it means as far as constructing broad social values. This task may not be so easy. Will these values manifest through users' habits? How will anyone commit to these values when they can easily find another system to represent opposing value system with a few clicks of the mouse? In other words, will the "truthful disclosure of the underlying rules (or algorithms) governing indexing, searching, and prioritizing" (Nissenbaum, p. 181) unleash anarchy within the internet that will become the end of any type of representation of a value system? I think that at first, yes. But over time, values would manifest through user habits and be committed to the same way they have been throughout history. The only downside is wading through the leftover algorithms that would, no doubt, have to be done by future generations of users.