ALGORITHMIC IDEOLOGY

Abstract

This article investigates how the new spirit of capitalism gets inscribed in the fabric of search algorithms by way of social practices. Drawing on the tradition of the social construction of technology (SCOT) and 17 qualitative expert interviews it discusses how search engines and their revenue models are negotiated and stabilized in a network of actors and interests, website providers and users first and foremost. It further shows how corporate search engines and their capitalist ideology are solidified in a socio-political context characterized by a techno-euphoric climate of innovation and a politics of privatization. This analysis provides a valuable contribution to contemporary search engine critique mainly focusing on search engines' business models and societal implications. It shows that a shift of perspective is needed from impacts search engines have on society towards social practices and power relations involved in the construction of search engines to renegotiate search engines and their algorithmic ideology in the future.

Keywords:

• search engine
• social construction of technology
• new spirit of capitalism
• Google
• information economy
• ideology

Acknowledgements

The research for this article was funded by HUMlab, Umeå University, Sweden (postdoctoral fellowship from 2010 to 2012). I am grateful to Patrik Svensson for the great support that facilitated my research. Further, I thank my HUMlab colleagues and participants of the ‘Marie Jahoda Summer School of Sociology’ (University of Vienna, 2011) and Sighard Neckel, in particular, for their helpful suggestions and comments on my project. Finally, I  also thank all my interviewees for having shared their experiences and opinions on search engine development with me and Ken Hillis, who inspired me to the title of this article Algorithmic Ideology.

Notes

More information on Google AdWords and AdSense could be found on Google's website: http://www.google.com/intl/en/ads/ (10 March 2012).

Furthermore, K. Hillis, M. Petit and K. Jarrett presented parts of their analysis on knowledge and power in the contemporary ‘culture of search’ at the AoIR conference in Gothenburg, 2010. Their book Google and the Culture of Search is supposed to be published by Taylor and Francis in 2012.

The great detail of user profiles has become clear during the release of three months of search engine data by AOL in 2006. See, for example, The New York Times article ‘A Face Is Exposed for AOL Searcher No. 4417749’, http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F10612FC345B0C7A8CDDA10894DE404482 (10 March 2012).

All quotations from German interviewees presented in the empirical analysis have been translated into English by the author.

Internet companies’ strong belief in information technology and capitalism has also been coined ‘Californian Ideology’. Boltanski and Chiapello (2007), however, have shown that the fundamental shift the capitalist ideology has been undergoing reaches far beyond the Californian border.

Google's webmaster guidelines: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35291 and Google Analytics’ webmaster tools: https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin?service=websiteoptimizer&continue=http://www.google.com/analytics/siteopt/%3Fhl%3Den&hl=en (10 March 2012).

The Firefox Add-on ‘TrackMeNot’ or the search engine ‘Scroogle’ are valuable exceptions because they allow users to employ the full services, while anonymizing search queries and messing up user profiles at the same time. URLs: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/trackmenot/ and http://scroogle.org/ (10 March 2012).

Google's new privacy policy and terms of service, starting from 1 March 2012 onwards: http://www.google.se/intl/en/policies/ (10 March 2012).

Internet Governance Forum: http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/ (10 March 2012).

German Enquete Commission, ‘Internet and Digital Society’: http://www.bundestag.de/internetenquete/ (10 March 2012).

Article on Google's new privacy policy and terms of service on Netzpolitik.org (in German): http://netzpolitik.org/2012/google-will-user-komplett-uberwachen/ (10 March 2012).

Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society: http://hiig.de/en/ (10 March 2012).