In Terms of Czech and South Korean Search Engine Technologies: Revisiting Googlobalization from Indigenous Perspectives

• In Event: Decolonizing Science: Where Have We Gotten To? - II

Abstract

Web search engines are one prominent R&D enterprise where data and algorithms join, sustained by computing infrastructures and business models. Although giant search engines exist in a few countries, i.e. Baidu (China) and Yandex (Russia), Internet users in most countries’ just 'google' their information online. Given that world-wide legislators are concerned about digital market revenue's monopolization and A.I. talent shortage, how have smaller nations responded to 'Googlobalization,' or the unilateral formalization/operationalization/operation of global information? What alternatives, if any, exist?

This talk examines two small, domestic search-engine-cum-web-portals, Seznam.cz (Czechia) and Naver (Republic of Korea), as cases studies of rare survivors of the Googlobalization of their respective national markets. My analysis proceeds along two dimensions. First, I analyze the domestic search engines’ possession of compatriot internet users’ information-seeking activities in terms of land-based critique of settler colonialism and reassessment of Marxist “primitive accumulation” (Coulthard, 2014). Second, I search out the contribution of these two geographically distant cases from Central Europe and East Asia, not even the second most largest country in each area, to the postcolonial understanding of the current global monopolistic/oligopolistic order of informational representation. I follow with a discussion of "Asia as method" thinking's potential and then centrifuge it back toward “the critical power of postcolonial non-essentializing and de-territorializing” in order to meet EASTS and EASST halfway (Fu, 2007; Anderson, 2012).

I conclude with empirical comparisons of two endeavors between the two search engines: their initial struggles to survive, and their attempts to relate to adjacent digital industries in more influential neighboring countries, Russia and Japan, efforts complicated by their shared Cold-War history.

Author

• Yoehan Oh, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute