Debat en boeklancering: De Macht van Google
Datum: 16 november 2010
Locatie: De Waag, Nieuwmarkt Amsterdam
Deur open: 15.30u, aanvang: 16u
Aanmelden verplicht: michelle@waag.org
Meer informatie: http://www.demachtvangoogle.nl/

Pim van der Feltz, directeur van Google Nederland, gaat op dinsdag 16 november vanaf 16.00 in debat over ‘de macht van Google’ met onder meer journalist Peter Olsthoorn.

Het debat is tevens de lancering van Olsthoorns recente publicatie: 'De Macht van Google. Werkt Google voor jou of werk jij voor Google?' Dit is het eerste complete Nederlandse boek over geschiedenis en strategie van Google en wat dat voor ons, klanten van Google, betekent.

De macht van Google wordt als mogelijk bedreigend ervaren op twee belangrijke terreinen: ten eerste de groeiende afhankelijkheid van Google als poort naar informatie die we relevant achten, in onderwijs, wetenschap, cultuur en economie; daarnaast met de vele persoonlijke data die gebruikers aan Google toevertrouwen met hun zoekopdrachten en surfgedrag, wat Google vastlegt en tijdelijk opslaat.

In inleidingen zullen eerst vier sprekers kort vertellen wat hen in Google intrigeert:
Vincent Everts verhaalt over zijn gebruik van (web)diensten van Google zoals YouTube, Gmail, Docs, Maps, Earth en systemen als Android en Chrome.
Geert Lovink zet uiteen welke bevindingen naar boven kwamen met congressen over het zoeken naar informatie die hij de afgelopen jaren mede organiseerde met het Institute of Network Cultures in Wenen en Amsterdam.
Pim van der Feltz zal vervolgens kort uiteenzetten hoe Google omgaat met innovatie, haar gebruikers en de verantwoordelijkheid die groei met zich meebrengt.
Peter Olsthoorn zal met enkele passages uit zijn boek duiden waar hij de macht die gebruikers Google toeschuiven ziet groeien.

Daarop zal het overgrote deel van de bijeenkomst zijn gewijd aan debat over Google, de snelle groei van zijn macht en de bedreigingen zoals van sociale media als Facebook. Het wordt geleid door Marleen Stikker, ondermeer directeur van De Waag.

Over het boek:
Titel: De macht van Google. Werkt Google voor jou of werk jij voor Google?
Auteur: Peter Olsthoorn
Paperback, 240 pagina’s
ISBN 978 90 215 4899 9
Prijs: € 12,95
Verschijningsdatum: 20 oktober 2010
http://www.demachtvangoogle.nl/

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 search engines 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.

Defining the actors in the power network, Röhle locates the search engine as intermediary between user and transparency, and between webmaster and attention. As Google enters the picture, it diverts all actions through its own network. From an ANT perspective, this makes it the obligatory passage point for both user and webmaster.

Instead of being a mere passage point, translation takes place. The PageRank algorithm establishes a shareholder democracy, where Google sees itself in charge of the interests of the Internet community. Furthermore, by providing a host of free webmaster tools and services, developers get associated and enrolled to index content that Google would otherwise not reach.

Through this enrollment webmasters enter Google’s disciplinary regime. Sites that do not comply with its webmaster code of conduct get punished by banishment, and webmasters are encouraged to report eachother.

A second regime Röhle identifies is governmental by nature, and based on the prediction of user behavior. In a manner of ‘risk management’ Google aims to gather intimate knowledge of people, in order to adapt its own behavior accordingly. A search engine, according to Röhle, is not primarily a tool to find information. It is an advertising system, translating user’s information needs into consumption needs.

One strategy to take would be to challenge the paradigm of technological closure. Links to privacy regulation are lost from the interface, while its minimal design falsely inspires a feeling of transparency. Furthermore, the right that commercial parties have on the use of our search data should be renegotiated.

Bernhard Rieder - Democratizing Search: Concepts and Challenges

Bernhard Rieder is assistant professor at the Département Hypermédia at the Université de Paris VIII. His research focuses on the theory, critique, and implementation of the concept of "delegation".

The larger shift from information scarcity to information abundance has given filtering processes priority over distribution processes. This development emphasizes the increased importance of making judgments. Compared to earlier search technologies, web search is significantly different: It takes the human out of the domain of knowledge, in favor of the incessant, brainless crawlers.

The dominant ranking paradigm on the web being recursive link analysis (PageRank), guiding principles are popularity (the logic of the hit) and convenience. Commercial interests in the search market guide attention in the direction of already dominant sources and views on the web, leaving a large amount of sites invisible.

One of the strategies challenging this paradigm over the last few years is that of Wikia Search, a service that applies the Wikipedia principles of transparency, community, quality and privacy to search. Wikia Search is open source, it uses distributed crawling and relies on user feedback on search results. As the technology is still in beta, it remains unclear how this voting principle will unfold. Will the SEO and advertisement industry come in, and, in general, is there a ‘right way’ to present results?

Plurality, Rieder argues, is more important than transparency. Conflict, or lack of consensus need not stand in the way of living together between civil rights and normative decision-making.

The main challenges for democratizing search are the costs of infrastructure, quantifiable markers for ranking, and changing user habits versus software defaults. There is no easy solution, but elements of one can be found at the user, provider and interface level.

On the user side, searching skills and politics, the practice and politics of linking, and general informational ecology should be part of our education system. On the provider side, the focus should be on antitrust measures and the building of a public infrastructure based on crawling and linking.

On the interface level, Rieder notes several promising developments, such as natural language processing, advanced search initiatives, clustered search, and sliders to define the popularity-level of ranking. In general, we need better APIs and larger result sets, more insight in search habits and in the consequences of ranking, and a better conceptual grasp on search engines.

Rieder concludes with a call for getting people back in the loop, hybrid, plural and complex as they are.

Session 3: Making Things Visible

Richard Rogers - Deep Methods for the Info-Political Study of Search Engines

Richard Rogers is Chair in New Media & Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam and director of the Govcom.org foundation.

After an introduction to the panel by Katja Mayer, Richard Rogers introduced the Amsterdam-based Digital Methods Initiative (DMI), a collaboration of Media Studies University of Amsterdam and Govcom.org Foundation. At DMI, researchers and programmers focus on developing research methods fitting to the technical specificities of new media.

When relating Digital Methods to the 1990s Virtual Methods research program, their different approaches originate from a different perspective on the relationship between the virtual and society. Whereas Virtual Methods focused on the embeddedness of the virtual in society, Digital Methods coined the term digital groundedness to research and demonstrate the way society is embedded within digital objects.

Rogers went on to compare and describe several methods to research ‘natively digital objects’ such as the link, the website, the engine and the sphere.

Looking at the research of links, social network analysis has been applied to the Internet fairly recently, studying the way websites or people are positioned within a network. Link studies by Digital Methods focus on Google’s view of links as votes. Through tools such as the IssueCrawler, a software tool that visualizes and localizes networks on the web, actors can be characterized and profiled based on their incoming and outgoing links.

Websites are commonly studied from a usability point of view or a SEO point of view, and site features can be judged, for instance, on their level of interactivity. An alternative approach would be to follow the medium and focus on the website as an archived object. Digital Methods uses the Internet Archive’s Wayback machine for this purpose, which privileges single site histories. The Google Politics of Tabs movie, online here, illustrates the methodology well.

It seems that googlization has made the engine an object for mass media critique and surveillance studies. The Digital Methods approach to study engines consists of capturing and saving search results, making it possible to look into ranking of a site or issue through time. The Issue Dramaturg was built to demonstrate the ‘drama’ behind information retrieval. Also, it uses a ‘Lipmannian device’ that queries the first hundred results for keywords on a certain issue - how far is it from the ‘top of the web’?

Spheres, finally, such as the blogosphere, often find there way into genre studies. Digital Methods sees spheres as demarcated areas, constructed by engines such as Google News (newssphere), or Technorati (tagosphere). It then becomes interesting to study and compare the prominence of certain issues within the various spheres.

Gon Zifroni & Tsila Hassine – Multipolar Search

Gon Zifroni is a designer and researcher at Metahaven Amsterdam, Tsila Hassine is an information artist and developer. Together they work on the Exodus search project.

Tsila Hassine kicked off by discussing several strategies to overcome the dominant ranking paradigm by web search engines, and the list as the dominant presentational metaphor.

Shmoogle.org could be Google’s best friend. Shmoogle allows you to perform a Google search, while losing the political and industrial weight of ranking. Google search results are presented randomly in a lengthy list without page breaks, advertising or hierarchy. Hassine notes that the design decisions made here are promoting the transparency of Google, and the access to web sites that hardly get found. The Shmoogle mechanism is one of pulling instead of pushing, ultimately leading to a broader web.

Another option to read information differently is to be creative with temporal organization. The IMAGE TRACER for instance, developed by Hassine herself and De Geuzen, archives Google image searches to track urls, appearance, disappearance and ranking through time. Saving images and metadata on a local server, a change of organization over time can be visualized.

Gon Zifroni then elaborated on networks and hierarchy. The scale-free character of the web promotes a ‘rich get richer’ mechanism, and network power is dispersed to the next connection. Linking within a community of consenting actors is an inward movement, which, on a network level, leads to disconnection.

Following this theory of ‘abundance of redundant relations’, Zifroni suggests a focus on the holes between high-density areas. These are more defining for their relation than links, and indicative of negative social capital. It is very hard to define a community on the web in a traditional understanding of borders, which is in turn promoted by search engine workings.

Zifroni proposes a theory about periphery, rather than the center. Attention should be called to the ‘bridging nodes’ in the network, the ones that are at the margin of clusters but might connect distinct spheres. With the Exodus research project, Hassine, Zifroni and others are looking at the periphery of information. As hubs and clusters exist on different scales, bridging across these scales will become highly important.

Discussion

The conference organizers had reserved the total of an hour for a plenary end discussion, turning out to be quite productive.

Aside from the mention of Wikia Search, the P2P alternative did not receive much attention in today’s talks but got elaborated on in the closing discussion. In terms of speed, the P2P engine will long remain in Google’s shadow. Tsila Hassine noted however, that regarding the quality of information we are looking for, it is far more interesting to think in terms of choice than in terms of speed. The idea of having several alternative models of search running in the background for specific searches is promising, considering developments such as Open Search and the Minerva distributed search project by the Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik.

Another subject not surfacing until the closing discussion was semantic search. In line with his earlier presentation, Paul Duguid argued that with search tools such as grep, we have moved into syntactic search, ignoring semantics. With information drawn from well informed sources, semantics would follow from the context. However, we move further and further away from that. Bernhard Rieder adds that not each resource is equally biased. Even in a list, we will find some way of consensus about value. Semantic search on the other hand, can give us something better than truth. Promising experiments are being done with experts classifying resources in folder structures, by way of a ‘soft ontology’.

An interesting remark made by an audience member, was that when we compare the industrial revolution to the information revolution, people saw their workforce institutionalized in the first. One of the speakers mentioned earlier that holding people together and engaging them in a struggle is very tough. According to Paul Duguid, the word user community gives a nice impression of a community united, but it is not, there is no collective user base. This fact also frustrates government intervention, as it is unclear on whose behalf it is acting. Furthermore, a significant difference between the US and Europe exists in a reversal of trust and mistrust put in institutions such as governments and corporations. The thought of a third party, a union or a body to lobby on a higher level could indeed be promising lest it, as Theo Röhle added, be less commercial and more political.

On the subject of organization, Richard Rogers noted to be glad not to have heard about the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ today. In contemplating what else to do with ‘everyone’, he expressed his faith in a shift from the panoptic to the synoptic model, in other words, to have many watchdogs watch the watchers.

With education coming up in most critical discussions on the future of search, the last subject of interest in the closing discussion was media literacy. It was suggested that, on the European level, media education is not a big issue. This thought was countered by Van Hoboken, noting that media literacy is in fact high on the European agenda. Indeed, it could be more prominently so and include more critical perspectives. Duguid mentioned that all sorts of literacy are taught in the American educational system, but the term media literacy is completely unclear. The notion changes with every decade; first off as ‘cultural literacy’, then ‘computer literacy’ and now ‘media literacy’. Education is very important, but literacy standards lead to shaky ground.

Publication

A publication following the conference is expected to appear in a couple of months.

This 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.

Faced with the ambitious task of giving a broad historical overview of information in 45 minutes, Paul Duguid set off on a strong pace. Taking Latour’s immutable mobiles as a theoretical base, his talk aimed to break the idea of information as a constant notion throughout history. What was the world like when we searched through analogue means, and how to define the quality of results?

Duguid emphasized the importance of storage to the nature of search. Throughout history we have seen selection criteria change with storage space and information carrier. The codex, eventually, gave us classification, indexes and swift distribution. The invention of the printing press rendered us with multiple and reliable copies. Across time, collections arise that are in fact selections, defined in an institutional and social context.

How does one judge quality? Is the original always better, do things get better over time, or are both positions true? This is the problem of the immutable mobile. Information does not speak for itself. Paper is often regarded as irrelevant to news, but it is ignorant to neglect the way we have historically used paper to constrain and select our news. It is important to recognize the integrity of the material as the context of information, it is not free standing or autonomous. We have always relied on institutions to guide us, and removing those constraints leads to uncertainty.

Furthermore, Duguid indicates, it is important to see where the power gets distributed to. Google and the advertisers define our information. There is one traditional institution that we see gaining some sort of power: the university. Alliance to a university, for Google as well as the individual, adds value. In the search for authority however, seeing old institutions made new again should be called problematic, rather than progress.

Claire Lobet-Maris - From Trust to Tracks

Next up was Claire Lobet-Maris, professor at the Computer Science Institute of the University of Namur, and co-director of CITA (Cellule Interfacultaire de Technology Assessment).

Technology Assessment (TA) studies and evaluates new technologies, based on the premise that society has a right to scrutinize their development and investigate possible ethical implications. As Lobet-Maris explained, first generation TA (70’s) was strongly fed by determinism and a sharp distinction between experts and public. Second generation TA came to regard technology predominantly as a social construct. Currently, Lobet-Maris claimed, a third generation of ‘militant and value oriented’ TA is emerging, that aims to increase social responsibility, as well as to open up the political scripts through which technologies actively shape society.

The issues raised by search engines from a TA perspective, concentrate around democracy, autonomy and regulation. Looking at search engines and democracy, Lobet-Maris identifies issues such as the equity of chance to exist on the web, the diversity and richness of public space as a public sphere, and transparency of the indexing and ranking metrics.

Regulation might take place in a number of ways. A market approach of regulating web operators is mentioned, although Lobet-Maris feels the distortion of information is too large a risk. Network regulation, where a trusted social network plays an intermediary role, is already common in the web sphere. However, the practice gives rise to socio-political questions and causes social fragmentation of the web sphere. The way to go in protecting democracy, Lobet-Maris argues, is state responsibility. As the Geneva declaration mentions, the web is a public global good. While the state has a responsibility to protect diversity and minority, such is difficult to endorse. Lobet-Maris suggests a ‘labeling’ of search engines by transparency, and the initiation of R&D projects that are based on democratic search metrics and the stimulation of market competition.

From the perspective of autonomy, Lobet-Maris addresses contextualization and personalization of information. Silent and non-transparent profiling creates an ‘iron numerical cage’ around the user, making it difficult to shape and manage one’s numerical track across the web and the narrative that consequently unfolds.

As these issues are traditionally addressed by a legal framework, finding new paths is important. State regulation in this respect seems the least viable option, as strong liberalization and globalization frustrate the application of laws. Market regulation based on ‘informed consent’ also fails, as the better part of Internet users does not read the terms of agreement. The third alternative Lobet-Maris sees, is based on the technological empowerment of citizens: Give people the technological capacity to manage and reset their profiles, and restore intellectual rights on their social identity.

Session 1: Search Engines and Civil Liberties

Gerald Reischl – Inside the Google Trap

Gerald Reischl is a Viennese journalist, writing for the technology section of the Austrian KURIER newspaper, and author of the book Die Google-Falle: Die Unkontrollierte Weltmacht Im Internet (Uberreuter, 2008).

After presenting the audience with the latest statistics on Google’s workforce and its German/Austrian market share, Reischl went on to list the main arguments defended in Die Google-Falle. Reischl feels Google can hardly be called a search engine any longer but is, in fact, a dangerous corporation with ambitions to control the internet and discard our privacy. Its market position and ever expanding services are dangerous to an information society.

A long string of patents is indicative of both Google’s historic and future incentives. The PageRank algorithm is celebrating its 10 year anniversary, while new patents, such as the Programmable Search Engine, are being claimed.

A recent debate on Google Analytics has inspired German news weekly Der Spiegel to delete the software from Spiegel Online. With 80 % of the websites today running Google Analytics, it is completely unclear which party collects what kind of information about your presence on the web. Reischl illustrated such during his presentation, by running a search for Spiegel Online on http://www.ontraxx.net, a service that detects Google Analytics on any given website. While Der Spiegel had indeed deleted the software from its server, the ontraxx program showed that Google Analytics continued to run, through third parties such as dating sites that advertise on Spiegel Online.

Google’s investment in DNA search project 23andMe is another of Reischl's worries. Obviously, health care is hardly core search engine business. The website asks you to send your saliva to the United States, after which it will make your complete DNA profile available online. All this can be done as we speak, for about 300 USD, within a time span of four to six weeks. The dangerous part, Reischl argues, is the way Google makes DNA testing seem 'normal'. Soon enough, companies will want to check a person’s DNA profile prior to employment, or a DNA button will appear on MySpace profiles.

Reischl predicts that Google will not remain everybody’s darling for long. Recent discussions about Chrome might be indicative of a more critical trend among users, and proper education should help to further raise awareness.

Joris van Hoboken - Search Engines and Digital Civil Rights

Joris van Hoboken is a full-time PhD candidate at the Institute for Information Law at the University of Amsterdam. He has a background in the Dutch digital civil rights movement Bits of Freedom, which is part of European Digital Rights (EDRI) and is currently a visiting researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

Van Hoboken’s talk focused on the legal framework search engines have to act within. First off, he indicated to be somewhat more positive about Google’s attempts to acknowledge digital civil rights than was Gerald Reischl. Instead of focusing on Google’s power, it is important to review alternatives to the existing policies.

Van Hoboken firstly addressed the various kinds of pressure that is exerted on entities mediating Internet access, such as ISPs and search engines. In France, the three-strikes-out strategy makes the ISP the new gatekeeper. In putting a stop to the violation of intellectual property rights through file sharing, the government might seriously harm the freedom of expression. Similar examples where ISPs decide what Internet we get to see can be found in the US where Verizon widely blocked Usenet access this summer, instead of blocking just the few offending groups.

Search is a focal point in content regulation as well. Pressure is exerted on search providers by institutions like the EU, often resulting in the removal of search results and takedown requests. In the case of national government ordering, filtering results in a geographical suppression of information, while keeping it findable outside of national limits. Self-regulated filtering by search engines takes place as well. Google.de, for instance, has been noted to filter certain right wing extremist content of its own accord completely.

In protecting the freedom of expression, Van Hoboken sees a role for politics. Democratic involvement is necessary, and debates should be taking place at this level. As freedom of expression often seems to be a ‘negative’ right, perceptions on the role of governments vary widely.

Van Hoboken then talked about the current regulatory involvement with search engines in the EU. It is hard to decide when exactly a search engine becomes liable for showing a link to illegal material, or when an ISP can be charged for enabling file sharing. Laws on so-called intermediary liability have been effective on the EU level since 2000. In these laws however, ISPs enjoy some sort of safe haven in order to be able to function at all. Search engines are not excluded from intermediary liability laws, giving cause for possible chilling effects concerning freedom of expression.

The European Commission recently issued a Green Paper on Copyright in the Knowledge Economy, which implicitly states that search engines might in future need prior permission to index a site, instead of the opt-out robot.txt-model that is currently applied. Obviously, publishers should have some means of control, but Van Hoboken feels this scenario could change the search engine landscape extremely.

Concluding his argument, Van Hoboken states that search engines are a primary target of information suppression. We should ask ourselves whether this is the road we want to take. Legal policy discussions affect the access to information, which is why they should be followed closely. And finally, the way in which the government might positively influence freedom of expression and the access to information in future should not be left unexplored.

part 2