Class Notes: April 22nd 2014

Search Engine Ethics & Safiya Noble's Hypervisibility

Transcript

1. Information Ethics Search is not neutral.
 
 DTC 356 Wednesday, April 22nd 2014
2. What determines a search result? What does a search result determine? Sexualized images of black women from Google Search: Hypervisibility as a Means of Rendering Black Women and Girls Invisible.
3. What determines a search result? (This is a live question. You may answer it.)
4. What Does a Search Result Determine? What’s the difference between a web site you can’t find on Google and a site that doesn’t exist? You are what Google tells people you are. (Are you frightened yet?)
5. Parental Advisory: Explicit Semantics! via @micheldumontier" by Duncan Hull Some Rights Reserved Who decides what a site is about?
6. “But now we—the customers, the employees, anyone—can route around the second order. We can confront the miscellaneous directly in all its unfulfilled glory. We can do it ourselves and, more significantly, we can do it together, figuring out the arrangements that make sense for us now and the new arrangements that make sense a minute later. Not only can we find what we need faster, but traditional authorities cannot maintain themselves by insisting that we have to go to them. The miscellaneous order is not transforming only business. It is changing how we think the world itself is organized and —perhaps more important—who we think has the authority to tell us so.” EiM pg. 23
7. Third Order: Newer. Bigger. Faster. More democratic. Distributed. Open. Better?
8. Third Order: Newer. Bigger. Faster. More democratic. Distributed. Open. Better?
9. Epistemology: study of meaning Quickly explained by showing how extremes are wrong. (Easier than showing how They’re useful.)
10. Relativists Everything is equally valid 2+2=5 (Real relativists don’t say/believe this.) (Real relativism is about humility.)
11. There is an objective truth that we can know. (Coincidentally, this objective truth strongly resembles my personal moral opinions.)
12. So What Does Google Give Us? (This is a live question. You may answer it.)
13. Relativists Everything is equally valid 2+2=5 (Real relativists don’t say/believe this.) (Real relativism is about humility.)
14. There is an objective truth that we can know. (Coincidentally, this objective truth strongly resembles my personal moral opinions.)
15. Hypervisibility Algorithm Sexualized images of black women from Google Search: Hypervisibility as a Means of Rendering Black Women and Girls Invisible.
16. Search is not neutral.
17. Search is not organic.
18. Search is not objective.
19. Search is not transparent.
20. Search is a technological solution to a particular kind of information problem. When digital information scales beyond what 2nd order techniques can handle, we get search.
21. Search results are not The Truth.