2000 - 2001
Location: Seminar Room D120
Time: 12 noon - 2 pm
Abstract:
This report is part of a project to study the "natural ethics" of information artifacts. We hypothesize that specific values are implicit in the design of such artifacts, and that these values can be uncovered by techniques analoguous to those used in the study of literature, e.g., determining what is important by examining placement, color, size, participation in repetative patterns, ease of access, participation in contrastative patterns, etc. Such studies can be formalized in the language of semiotics, but must NOT be divorced from the context of their actual use within social groups. This case study examines value systems that can be imputed to well known web "search engines"; we first note that such engines in fact are little more than large databases of URLs with a graphical user interface. We then consider two main issues: (1) how URLs are chosen for inclusion; and (2) how access to them is structured. We find that commercial values play a large and increasing role, but that the values of users can also be detected, through the "populist" ethic used for URL selection, and through the account taken of the biological, cognitive and social natures of users. By contrast, traditional database access mechanisms like SQL reveal a staunchly modernist value system. The foundation for this work is the author's "social theory of information," which is based on a combination of semiotics and ethnomethodology. In brief, an item of information is defined socially, by reference to some group to which it is important, and semiotically, through the system of differences in which it participates; a similar notion was called a "category system" in ethnomethodology by Harvey Sacks. Extra precision is available through the author's "algebraic semiotics," which combines social semiotics with algebraic specification; though such precision is hardly needed for present purposes, having it in the background does mean that the technical terms and the arguments in our study can be made much more rigorous than is usual.