(Re)search results: search engines and the logic of efficiency in scholarship
(Re)search results: search engines and the logic of efficiency in scholarship
This article uses the search engine as a heuristic for reflecting upon the extent to which knowledge production within the academy both shapes and is shaped by the media that it studies and with which its research is enabled. More specifically, it argues that the efficiency that has helped make search both a paradigmatic feature of digital culture and a habitual, everyday activity is achieved not just through speediness of results, but through a rationalized, regimented, and standardized structuration of knowledge, ensuring the latter is amenable to computational processing and retrieval. Search engines exercise a crypto-normative function, establishing formal norms and constraints relating to knowledge production, including academic research outputs, at the same time that they furnish one of the principal means by which this research is conducted. The purpose of this article is not to decry bureaucratic modes of conduct, which are central to the responsibilities of academic life, but to stress the importance of scholars reflecting upon their own relationship to the technologies of which they make use and the temporalities these technologies engender.
media theory, knowledge, efficiency, search engines, scholarship, digital culture, normativity
Sutherland, Thomas
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Wark, Scott
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Sutherland, Thomas
a9a8e23c-232e-47ca-9be6-abeac690bfb2
Wark, Scott
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Sutherland, Thomas and Wark, Scott
(2024)
(Re)search results: search engines and the logic of efficiency in scholarship.
Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory.
(doi:10.1080/1600910X.2024.2352043).
Abstract
This article uses the search engine as a heuristic for reflecting upon the extent to which knowledge production within the academy both shapes and is shaped by the media that it studies and with which its research is enabled. More specifically, it argues that the efficiency that has helped make search both a paradigmatic feature of digital culture and a habitual, everyday activity is achieved not just through speediness of results, but through a rationalized, regimented, and standardized structuration of knowledge, ensuring the latter is amenable to computational processing and retrieval. Search engines exercise a crypto-normative function, establishing formal norms and constraints relating to knowledge production, including academic research outputs, at the same time that they furnish one of the principal means by which this research is conducted. The purpose of this article is not to decry bureaucratic modes of conduct, which are central to the responsibilities of academic life, but to stress the importance of scholars reflecting upon their own relationship to the technologies of which they make use and the temporalities these technologies engender.
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sutherland_and_wark_research_results
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Accepted/In Press date: 26 April 2024
e-pub ahead of print date: 16 June 2024
Keywords:
media theory, knowledge, efficiency, search engines, scholarship, digital culture, normativity
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 494210
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/494210
ISSN: 1600-910X
PURE UUID: 86fc4346-2e9f-4eb2-beec-0ab4ce68d38c
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Date deposited: 30 Sep 2024 16:37
Last modified: 02 Oct 2024 02:14
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Author:
Thomas Sutherland
Author:
Scott Wark
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