Health information politics: Reconsidering the democratic ideal of the Web as a source of medical knowledge

Abstract

This paper challenges the democratic ideal of the Web as a new public sphere in the medical context. Drawing on a mix of methods it investigates how different Web site providers configure and position their diabetes sites in the multitude of online health information, search engine results in particular. Building on insights gained from critical new media studies and medical sociology, it shows that a range of power relations and information politics are involved in these practices, triggering information visibility hierarchies and a commercialisation of online health information, partly overlapping with off-line contexts. To conclude, it argues for reconsidering the democratic ideal of the Web and focusing on market dynamics involved in the production of medical Web information co-produced by Web site providers and search engine algorithms.

Technoscientific promotion and biofuel policy: How the press and search engines stage the biofuel controversy

“…Similarly, the Internet, and the search engine Google most particularly, has become a site of struggle for attention. While the Internet was described as a decentralizing democratic technology in its early days (Berners-Lee and Fischetti, 2000;Kahn and Kellner, 2004), critical studies have pointed to information hierarchies and commercial biases introduced by search algorithms undermining the 'democratic ideal of the web' (Mager, 2012b) or the web's potential to become a new or even 'better public sphere' (Gerhards and Schäfer, 2010). According to Brin and Page (1998), the founders of Google, the PageRank algorithm would provide a mathematical way of ranking search results since it uses the number and quality of links a website gets as an indicator of the value of that website (among other factors such as clicks from users).…”

European Search? How to counter-imagine and counteract hegemonic search with European search engine projects

“…Finally, the notion of Europe as federated, multicultural, and diverse can be strengthened to promote digital technologies and infrastructures devoted to values like decentralization, collectivity, and cooperation. Diversifying technology developments can contribute to a range of different search engines, social media platforms, and infrastructures, which would enable users to bypass hegemonic gatekeepers and their commercial bias and discriminatory content that have long been criticized (Introna and Nissenbaum, 2000;Mager, 2012a;Noble, 2018). It could lead to "fundamentally different projects that challenge power at their source," as data justice scholars have called for (D'Ignazio and Klein, 2020: 65).…”

“…1 Even though the numbers differ among European countries, with Germany having a larger share of privacyfriendly search engines, for example, and the Czech Republic having its own local search engine, Seznam, with a relatively high number of users (10.8%) due to late investments by Google and better results in the Czech language 2 , the overall picture is pretty clear: Google is the undisputed number one on the European search engine market. Its hegemonic position has triggered criticism from early on, much of which has focused on search engine bias and lack of algorithmic transparency (Introna and Nissenbaum, 2000;Mager, 2012a;Noble, 2018), data-driven business models that contribute to "surveillance capitalism" (Fuchs, 2011;Zuboff, 2019), as well as the company's exploitation of its quasi-monopolist position to gain a competitive advantage (Lewandowski et al, 2018). It has further led to the idea of creating a European competitor that would allow Europe to escape its dependence on US-American, and increasingly Chinese, digital technologies, platforms, and infrastructures.…”

Valuating Words: Semantic Practices in Web Search Advertising

“…Kaplan (2014) and Thornton (2016, 2017b, 2018) refer to Google’s process of commodifying words as “linguistic capitalism.” It has also been associated with various alternative forms of capitalism by other scholars. Most importantly, Mager’s extensive work has shown how Boltanski and Chiapello’s “new spirit of capitalism,” which fosters not only profit-making but also commodification, is deeply embedded in the way web search works Mager (2010, 2012, 2014). In 2002, not long after Google AdWords was launched, French artist Christophe Bruno (in a project on web search advertising) called Google’s web search advertising system “semantic capitalism” (Bruno, 2002).…”