Theo Röhle: Der Google-Komplex: Über Macht im Zeitalter des Internets (2010) [German]

Meistgenutzte Suchmaschine, weltgrößter Datensammler, teuerstes Medienunternehmen – es liegt nahe, »Google« als Supermacht zu bezeichnen. Und doch greift diese Beschreibung zu kurz.

Unter Bezug auf Michel Foucault sowie die Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie entwickelt Theo Röhle ein präzises, relationales Verständnis von Macht, das den Blick auf die vielfältigen Interaktionen der beteiligten Akteure öffnet und ein komplexes System von Verhandlungen zutage fördert.

Eine zeitgemäße Analyse digitaler Medienmacht an der Schnittstelle von Medienwissenschaft, Informationswissenschaft und Surveillance Studies.

Publisher transcript, Bielefeld, 2010
ISBN 9783837614787
266 pages

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National Security Agency: Untangling the Web: A Guide to Internet Research (2007)

“The manual just released by the NSA following a FOIA request filed in April by MuckRock. The book is filled with advice for using search engines, the Internet Archive and other online tools.” (source)

Publisher Center for Digital Content of the National Security Agency, February 2007
Unclassified in May 2013
643 pages
via Marcell Mars, via Wired

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Alexander Halavais: Search Engine Society (2008)

Search engines have become a key part of our everyday lives. Yet while much has been written about how to use search engines and how they can be improved, there has been comparatively little exploration of what the social and cultural effects might be. Like all technologies, search engines exist within a larger political, cultural, and economic environment. This volume aims to redress this balance and to address crucial questions such as:

* How have search engines changed the way we organize our thoughts about the world, and how we work?
* What are the ‘search engine wars’, what do they portend for the future of search, and who wins or loses?
* To what extent does political control of search engines, or the political influence of search engines, affect how they are used, misused, and regulated?
* Does the search engine help shape our identities and interactions with others, and what implications does this have for privacy?

Informed members of the information society must understand the social contexts in which search engines have been developed, what that development says about us as a society, and the role of the search engine in the global information environment. This book provides the perfect starting point.

Publisher Polity, 2008
Digital Media and Society series
ISBN 0745642152, 9780745642154
196 pages

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Google Search Quality Rating Guidelines (2007-2012)

Google’s manual for its unseen humans who rate the web. The raters are being hired through Google’s contractors such as Lionbridge, Leapforce and Appen Butler Hill.

Publisher Google, Inc.
43 pages; 125 pages; 161 pages
via Google Search

interview with a Google Search quality rater (searchengineland.com)
discussion (Slashdot)
commentary (v.3.27, searchengineland.com)
commentary (v.3.18, searchenginewatch.com)
commentary (v.2.1, searchengineland.com)

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Boris Groys: Google: Words Beyond Grammar (2011)

In times when the exchange with the world largely takes place on the Internet, the search engine Google primarily regulates the parameters and formats of this conversation. For the philosopher and media theoretician Boris Groys, Google thus takes on the traditional role of philosophy and religion. Philosophical precursors for the dissolution of different kinds of discourses, the emancipation of words from grammar and accordingly their equalizing, as Google produces it, span from Plato to Saussure’s structuralism to Derrida’s deconstruction. Another analogy is the twentieth-century avant-garde’s production of word clouds that are freed from their context, in particular the Conceptual art of the 1960s and ’70s. As a result of the radical freeing of words, Groys names “the struggle for a utopian ideal of the free flow of information—the free migration of liberated words through the totality of social space.”

Publisher Hatje Cantz, December 2011
Series: dOCUMENTA (13): 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken No. 046
English/German edition
ISBN 3775728953, 9783775728959
36 pages

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Jeff Jarvis: Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live (2011)

A visionary and optimistic thinker examines the tension between privacy and publicness that is transforming how we form communities, create identities, do business, and live our lives.

Thanks to the internet, we now live—more and more—in public. More than 750 million people (and half of all Americans) use Facebook, where we share a billion times a day. The collective voice of Twitter echoes instantly 100 million times daily, from Tahrir Square to the Mall of America, on subjects that range from democratic reform to unfolding natural disasters to celebrity gossip. New tools let us share our photos, videos, purchases, knowledge, friendships, locations, and lives.

Yet change brings fear, and many people—nostalgic for a more homogeneous mass culture and provoked by well-meaning advocates for privacy—despair that the internet and how we share there is making us dumber, crasser, distracted, and vulnerable to threats of all kinds. But not Jeff Jarvis.

In this shibboleth-destroying book, Public Parts argues persuasively and personally that the internet and our new sense of publicness are, in fact, doing the opposite. Jarvis travels back in time to show the amazing parallels of fear and resistance that met the advent of other innovations such as the camera and the printing press. The internet, he argues, will change business, society, and life as profoundly as Gutenberg’s invention, shifting power from old institutions to us all.

Based on extensive interviews, Public Parts introduces us to the men and women building a new industry based on sharing. Some of them have become household names—Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Eric Schmidt, and Twitter’s Evan Williams. Others may soon be recognized as the industrialists, philosophers, and designers of our future.

Jarvis explores the promising ways in which the internet and publicness allow us to collaborate, think, ways—how we manufacture and market, buy and sell, organize and govern, teach and learn. He also examines the necessity as well as the limits of privacy in an effort to understand and thus protect it.

This new and open era has already profoundly disrupted economies, industries, laws, ethics, childhood, and many other facets of our daily lives. But the change has just begun. The shape of the future is not assured. The amazing new tools of publicness can be used to good ends and bad. The choices—and the responsibilities—lie with us. Jarvis makes an urgent case that the future of the internet—what one technologist calls “the eighth continent”—requires as much protection as the physical space we share, the air we breathe, and the rights we afford one another. It is a space of the public, for the public, and by the public. It needs protection and respect from all of us. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in the wake of the uprisings in the Middle East, “If people around the world are going to come together every day online and have a safe and productive experience, we need a shared vision to guide us.” Jeff Jarvis has that vision and will be that guide.

Publisher Simon & Schuster, 2011
ISBN 1451636008, 9781451636000
272 pages

review (Evgeny Morozov, The New Republic)

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Berin Szoka, Adam Marcus (eds.): The Next Digital Decade: Essays on the Future of the Internet (2010)

This unique book brings together 26 thought leaders on Internet law, philosophy, policy and economics to consider, from a wide variety of perspectives, what the next digital decade might bring for the Internet. This book is essential reading for anyone gazing toward the digital future.

The book’s 31 essays address questions such as: Has the Internet been good for our culture? Is the Internet at risk from the drive to build more secure, but less “open” systems and devices? Is the Internet really so “exceptional?” Has it fundamentally changed economics? Who—and what ideas—will govern the Net in 2020? Should online intermediaries like access providers, hosting providers, search engines and social networks do more to “police” their networks, increase transparency, or operate “neutrally?” What future is there for privacy online? Can online free speech be regulated? Can it really unseat tyrants?

With contributions by Robert D. Atkinson, Stewart Baker, Ann Bartow, Yochai Benkler, Larry Downes, Josh Goldfoot, Eric Goldman, James Grimmelmann, H. Brian Holland, David R. Johnson, Andrew Keen, Hon. Alex Kozinski, Mark MacCarthy, Geoffrey Manne, Evgeny Morozov, Milton Mueller, John Palfrey, Frank Pasquale, Berin Szoka, Paul Szynol, Adam Thierer, Hal Varian, Christopher Wolf, Tim Wu, Michael Zimmer, Jonathan Zittrain, Ethan Zuckerman.

Publisher TechFreedom, Washington DC, 2010
ISBN 1435767861, 9781435767867
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 Unported License
575 pages

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