Suchergebnisse

This article investigates how developers of alternative search engines challenge increasingly corporate imaginaries of digital futures by building out counter-imaginaries of search engines devoted to social values instead of mere profit maximization. Drawing on three in-depth case studies of European search engines, it analyzes how search engine developers counter-imagine hegemonic search, what social values support their imaginaries, and how they are intertwined with their sociotechnical practices. This analysis shows that notions like privacy, independence, and openness appear to be fluid, context-dependent, and changing over time, leading to a certain "value pragmatics" that allows the projects to scale beyond their own communities of practice. It further shows how European values, and broader notions of Europe as "unified or pluralistic," are constructed and co-produced with developers' attempts to counter-imagine and counteract hegemonic search. To conclude, I suggest three points of intervention that may help alternative search engine projects, and digital technologies more generally, to not only make their counter-imaginaries more powerful, but also acquire the necessary resources to build their technologies and infrastructures accordingly. I finally discuss how "European values," in all their richness and diversity, can contribute to this undertaking.

Helga Nowotny: Die KI sei mit euch: Macht, Illusion und Kontrolle algorithmischer Vorhersage. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz 2023. 978-3-7518-0396-0

Roberto Simanowski: Todesalgorithmus - Das Dilemma der künstlichen Intelligenz. Wien: Passagen Verlag 2020. 9783709204177

In this article, I investigate Internet governance in practice by focusing on search engines, Google in particular. Building on science and technology studies–grounded Internet governance research, I ask how different stakeholders interpret governing by algorithms, the governing of algorithms, and the limits of various governing modes when considering local specificities. To answer these questions, I conducted 18 qualitative interviews with key experts involved in search engine governance from four distinct societal domains: policy, law, civil society, and the IT sector (from Austria and/or the European level). In this analysis, I show that perceptions of search engine governance are shaped not only in specific cultural contexts but also within particular social groups and their situated knowledges. I further elaborate how joint efforts are imagined as a means to challenge powerful search engines and their governing abilities cutting through different societal arenas and areas of expertise. Finally, I discuss implications of this analysis regarding the complex relationship between global technology and local cultures.

This article discusses the co-production of search technology and a European identity in the context of the EU data protection reform. The negotiations of the EU data protection legislation ran from 2012 until 2015 and resulted in a unified data protection legislation directly binding for all European member states. I employ a discourse analysis to examine EU policy documents and Austrian media materials related to the reform process. Using the concept 'sociotechnical imaginary', I show how a European imaginary of search engines is forming in the EU policy domain, how a European identity is constructed in the envisioned politics of control, and how national specificities contribute to the making and unmaking of a European identity. I discuss the roles that national technopolitical identities play in shaping both search technology and Europe, taking as an example Austria, a small country with a long history in data protection and a tradition of restrained technology politics.

AbstractWhile the Internet is often discussed as empowering or endangering patients due to broadening access to medical and health‐related information, little is known about the way patients actually get informed about medical conditions and how the technology shapes their practices. This article draws on 40 user observations and 40 qualitative interviews to explore how users employ the web to obtain knowledge about a chronic disease in the Austrian context. Following concepts from the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) it explores how users' individual medical preferences and search engines' mechanisms of pre‐filtering information co‐shape online health information practices. The analysis demonstrates that search engines are not passive intermediaries, but rather actively shape how users browse through, select and evaluate health information in the context of their own bodies of knowledge. Accordingly, new skills are required on the part of users, but also on the part of medical professionals and policy makers. Both policy makers and doctors should engage with users' highly individual search practices and establish more dialogue‐oriented and technology‐focused health policy measures, rather than trying to educate users with standardized quality criteria for websites not responding to users' online routines and needs.

While most of the existing research about online health information focuses exclusively on either the provider or the user side of communication circuits, this article aims to integrate and discuss both sides and their mediated relation to one another. Drawing on actor-network theory, it conceptualizes the provision and use of online health information as sociotechnical. It questions concretely how website providers position their websites and information, how users browse through the web and assemble information, and interrogates the various concepts of online health information these different practices imply. Further, it asks how search engines, and Google in particular, come to play such a dominant role in the way health-related web information is provided and used. The article concludes by evaluating the implications of the findings in regard to debates about the quality of online health information and the way in which web information is distributed and acquired on a broader scale.

Visions of the future are omnipresent in current debates about the digital transformation. This introductory article and the full special issue are concerned with the function, power, and performativity of future visions and how they relate to the making and governing of digital technology. Revisiting existing concepts, we particularly discuss and advance the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries. In difference to ephemeral visions and partisan ideas, imaginaries are collectively held and institutionally stabilized. Nonetheless, we hold that they are multiple, contested, and commodified rather than monolithic, linear visions of future trajectories enacted by state actors. Introducing and summarizing the articles of the special issue, we conclude that imaginaries are increasingly dominated by technology companies that not only take over the imaginative power of shaping future society, but also partly absorb public institutions' ability to govern these very futures with their rhetoric, technologies, and business models.

Gesundheits-Apps und Tracking-Geräte zum Messen, Speichern und Verarbeiten von Körperdaten sind weltweit im Vormarsch. In unserem Artikel verwenden wir verschiedene Ansätze aus Wissenschafts- und Technikforschung (STS), Surveillance Studies und Medizin-Soziologie um diese globalen Trends der Körperdatenerfassung in gesundheitsbezogenen Kontexten erfassen und theoretisieren zu können. Wir stellen das post-digitale Konzept des "data body" als Schnittpunkt von Online- und Offline-Welten, individuellen und kollektiven Dimensionen, privaten und öffentlichen Aspekten vor, wobei wir besonderes Augenmerk auf die Verschränkung des physischen Körpers mit seinen Datendimensionen legen. Der data body soll so in seinen Ausprägungen zwischen Empowerment und sozialer Kontrolle besser wahrnehmbar werden. Abschließend diskutieren wir, wie data bodies im Hinblick auf Eigentumsrechte, Pflege und Kontrolle sowohl von Individuen als auch Gemeinschaften in Zukunft gehandhabt werden können.

What are the conditions for the public understanding of biofuels and how do the media shape these conditions under the influence of a new production of knowledge? This article investigates how the biofuel controversy plays out in the Swedish press and Google search engine results and analyses winners and losers in the tight attention economy of contemporary media. It describes different visibility strategies biofuel stakeholders employ in both media arenas, and identifies a form of technoscientific promotion that hybrid actors use to succeed in the day-to-day struggle for media attention. To conclude, it raises broader societal questions of the contemporary blurring of knowledge boundaries and the emergence of new information hierarchies and their biases. By understanding how contemporary media shape controversies, we can address the democratic potential of both mass media and science.

In der ersten Ausgabe des Jahres liefern die HerausgeberInnen einen Blick hinter die Kulissen von Momentum Quarterly und blicken zurück auf das vergangene sowie voraus auf das kommende Jahr.