Information Education and Work

Greeting and salutations to all, and welcome to another week of blogging.

This week we go further into the idea of information as power by looking at search engines and the power that the giant search companies possess over the information that we have access to.

Howard and Massanari (2007) claim that "searching for information is a social act, shaped by the political, economic, and cultural contexts' of the time we live in. This is indeed true as acquiring new information alongside what you are searching for almost helps to define a person. As we saw in the lecture through the alaskan web searcher, it is quite easy to discern a users personality or interests through their search results. This is reinforced by Howard and Massanari (2007) when they state "being more educated or being in a higher income bracket predicts most of the variation in Internet users' experience." This then ties into knowledge as power and almost forms a sort of cycle with the knowledgeable getting more knoledgeable. At least these days it is now possible, and facilitated by the internet medium, for the poor to become knowledgeable. When a search is done and results processed, data becomes knowledge.

Just as the human mind operated by assosciation, as we saw in the word game where pepper turned to steak (peppersteak yum), so too do search engines. Here is something interesting about search engines. When we search we are searching only the engines database, not the entire web. This gives raise to censorship and bias issues.

An example of one such issue occured when MIA's new film clip got banned from YouTube after intervention from powerful forces. Also it is almost mind boggling to me that more Australians arn't up in arm about the proposed censorship laws for Australia. If information is knowledge then cut mine down and I WILL riot. (maybe?)

Howard, P.N. and Massanari, A. (2007). Learning to Search and Searching to Learn: Income, Education and Experience Online. Journal of Computer - Meditated Communication, 12(3). Article 5.