Invisible Search and Online Search Engines considers the use of search engines in contemporary everyday life and the challenges this poses for media and information literacy. Looking for mediated information is mostly done online and arbitrated by the various tools and devices that people carry with them on a daily basis. Because of this, search engines have a significant impact on the structure of our lives, and personal and public memories. Haider and Sundin consider what this means for society, while also uniting research on information retrieval with research on how people actually look for and encounter information.Search engines are now one of society's key infrastructures for knowing and becoming informed. While their use is dispersed across myriads of social practices, where they have acquired close to naturalised positions, they are commercially and technically centralised. Arguing that search, searching, and search engines have become so widely used that we have stopped noticing them, Haider and Sundin consider what it means to be so reliant on this all-encompassing and increasingly invisible information infrastructure.Invisible Search and Online Search Engines is the first book to approach search and search engines from a perspective that combines insights from the technical expertise of information science research with a social science and humanities approach. As such, the book should be essential reading for academics, researchers, and students working on and studying information science, library and information science (LIS), media studies, journalism, digital cultures, and educational sciences.
Purpose -To provide an analysis of the notion of "information poverty" in library and information science (LIS) by investigating concepts, interests and strategies leading to its construction and thus to examine its role as a constitutive element of the professional discourse. Design/methodology/approach -Starting from a Foucauldian notion of discourse, "information poverty" is examined as a statement in its relation to other statements in order to highlight assumptions and factors contributing to its construction. The analysis is based on repeated and close reading of 35 English language articles published in LIS journals between 1995 and 2005. Findings -Four especially productive discursive procedures are identified: economic determinism, technological determinism and the "information society", historicising the "information poor", and the library profession's moral obligation and responsibility.Research limitations/implications -The material selection is linguistically and geographically biased. Most of the included articles originate in English-speaking countries. Therefore, results and findings are fully applicable only in an English language context. Originality/value -The focus on overlapping and at times conflicting discursive procedures, i.e. the results of alliances and connections between statements, highlights how the "information poor" emerge as a category in LIS as the product of institutionally contingent, professional discourse. By challenging often unquestioned underlying assumptions, this article is intended to contribute to a critical examination of LIS discourse, as well as to the analysis of the discourses of information, which dominate contemporary society. It is furthermore seen to add to the development of discourse analytical approaches in LIS research.
IntroductionThis study investigates the role of online searching in everyday life. Online searchingtypically understood as the use of general purpose search engines -has developed into a close to naturalised part of most peoples' lives and the dominant search engine Google has gained a prominent status in contemporary culture (Hillis et al., 2013). Google has turned into a commonly used verb and 'to google' is now almost synonymous with 'finding out about things'. Studies have shown how search engines in many areas are identified as the premium tool for finding information (e.g. Jamali and Asadi, 2010;Rowlands et al., 2008). Within information science, online searching has been extensively investigated within information retrieval (IR) as well as in experimental laboratory studies on search behaviour (Jansen and Rieh, 2010). However, the knowledge gained from information science has only in exceptional cases been used for enabling an understanding of the role of online searching on the web in and for everyday life (Schroeder, 2015). At the same time, studies on information seeking in everyday life have rarely considered online searching. Thus, as a discipline, information Postprint of article appearing in Journal of Documentation Vol. 73 No 2, Please cite the published version of the article.2 science needs to develop an in-depth understanding of online searching in and for everyday life.We approach online searching as an activity central to many of today's social practices.More specifically, we study how people experience and reflect on online searching -i.e.the use of general purpose search engines -in relation to different parts of their lives and which pivotal issues emerge as shaping the understanding and meaning of search and search engines in contemporary culture. The aim of the study is thus to elucidate how meaning is assigned to online searching by viewing it as a mundane, yet often invisible, activity of everyday life and an integrated part of various social practices. We have carried out 21 focus groups with 127 people in order for them to discuss and reflect on a subject that is often not thought of and even less often communicated in research.When studying peoples' information seeking the dominant theoretical lenses have been person-in-situation theory and task theory (Talja and Nyce, 2015). In either case, the starting point is a cognitive problem that demands information as well as information processing in order to be solved (e.g. Johnson et al., 2015). In contrast, here, we start from an understanding of information searching as entangled across practices and material arrangements (Orlikowski and Scott, 2008;Orlikowski, 2007) Taraborelli (2008, p. 196) distinguishes between evaluative judgements (content) and predictive judgements of reliability, i.e. judgement made "prior to its actual inspection", and claims that the latter is important when understanding how we trust web information. Hargittai et al. (2010) show that young adults, rather than evaluating a content's credibility, tend to rely...
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