How to push back hegemonic search? Analyzing alternative imaginaries in search engine design and their potential to contribute to more open digital futures

• In Event: Grassroots Innovation: Hacking, Making, Hobby, Entrepreneurship 1

Abstract

Many digital technologies are driven by big US-American technology companies and their innovation rhetoric nowadays. CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Elon Musk (Tesla) or Sundar Pichai (Google) have become important figures in shaping artificial intelligence, self-driving cars and other “smart” applications. Their imaginaries of future society have become deeply embedded in technology, social practices and people’s minds. They spread through mass media, public debates and policy lobbying, but also through digital devices, applications and business models. As they settle in technology, infrastructure and daily routines they unfold their capacity to redefine the very nature of privacy, democracy and the self. They undermine the “capacity for democratic self-government” (Cohen 2013: 1913). But how can these hegemonic imaginaries be pushed back? How can alternative digital futures emerge and take shape? And how can they grow and gain ground in technology, social practices and wider society?

These are the questions to be answered in this talk by focusing on alternative search engines and the future visions driving them. Drawing on three empirical case studies (Open Web Index initiative, open source search engine YaCy/ SUSI.AI, and privacy-friendly search engine StartPage) I will analyze “vanguard visions” (Hilgartner 2015) articulated by the three developer teams, how they get embedded in software practices and technology, and their potential to grow into broader “sociotechnical imaginaries” (Jasanoff and Kim 2009, Jasanoff 2015). Which strategies and pathways the three projects follow to spread and stabilize their “vanguard visions” through their developments and public performances will be analyzed. In this analysis, a particular focus will be put on the way “openness” is envisioned and embedded in sociotechnical arrangements and what differences occur. Whether these alternative visions and technologies have the potential to spread beyond their own communities and grow into broader, collectively held "sociotechnical imaginaries" with the capacity to contribute to more open, self-determined digital futures and what requirements would be needed to support this process will be finally discussed.

References:
Cohen JE (2013) What privacy is for? Harvard Law Review 126: 1904‐1933.
Hilgartner, S. (2015) Capturing the imaginary: Vanguards, visions and the synthetic biology revolution. In Hilgartner S., C.A. Miller, R. Hagendijk (eds): Science and Democracy: Making Knowledge and making power in the biosciences and beyond. New York: Routledge: 33-55.
Jasanoff, S. (2015) Future Imperfect: Science, Technology and the Imaginations of Modernity. In S. Jasanoff and S.H. Kim (eds) Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power. Chicago and London: University of California Press: 1–33.
Jasanoff S and Kim S.H (2009) Containing the Atom: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Nuclear Power in the United States and South Korea. Minerva 47: 119–146.

Author

• Astrid Mager, Austrian Academy of Sciences