Affective capitalism of knowing and the society of search engine

Abstract

Purpose: This article discusses the affective premises and economics of the influence of search engines on knowing and informing in the contemporary society. Design/methodology/approach: A conceptual discussion of affective the premises and framings of the capitalist economics of knowing is presented. Findings:The main proposition of this text is that the exploitation of affects is entwined in the competing market and emancipatory discourses and counterdiscourses both as intentional interventions, and perhaps even more significantly, as unintentional influences that shape the ways of knowing in the peripheries of the regime that shape cultural constellations of their own. Affective capitalism bounds and frames our ways of knowing in ways that are difficult to anticipate and read even from the context of the regime itself. Originality/value: In the relatively extensive discussion on the role of affects in the contemporary capitalism, influence of affects on knowing and their relation to search engine use has received little explicit attention so far.

Genres and situational appropriation of information

“…The ubiquity and effectiveness of searching reminds of Jevons paradox (Nardi et al, 2018) that more efficient technologies lead to increasing consumption. In an analogous manner, more effective information seeking seems to have led to an overflow of information and information searching -in a manner discussed, for instance, by Huvila (2012a;2016a), Haider and Sundin (2019), and others. Savolainen's (2016) overview of information seeking related concepts shows that the term has been used to refer to a broad range of modalities of information acquisition, also beyond seeking and searching.…”

Monstrous hybridity of social information technologies: Through the lens of photorealism and non-photorealism in archaeological visualization

“…Apart from being illustrative of the perplexities of archaeological work, it is notable that the anxieties that human-technology entanglements and introduction of new social information technologies reduce the role of human agency and critical intellect are by no means specific to archaeology and visualizations. They remind of the critique of the impact of growing affective and economical dependence on search engines (e.g., Huvila 2016;Mager 2012), and more generally, on algorithms (e.g., Haider and Sundin 2016;Mager 2014;Sundin et al 2017). Like other informational things such as search engines and information systems, archaeological visualizations are performative (MacKenzie 2006) and can be considered as cyborgs.…”

“…They all are amalgamations of technologies and human-beings, wherein different programmes and anti-programmes embedded in an incomplete cyborg can compete, dominate, succumb or be in relative balance. In the context of information search, the critics (e.g., Huvila 2016;Mager 2014;Sundin et al 2017) argue that there are signs that the programme of making information searching and retrieval easier is taking over the (anti-) programme of critical reflection and learning in the contemporary society. Similar observations have been made with regard to big data analytics (e.g., Frick e 2015; Kitchin 2014), automated decisionmaking or "roboprocesses" (Besteman and Gusterson 2019), imaging technologies (de Rijcke and Beaulieu 2014), news videos (Woxland et al 2017), and the adverse effects of watching television (e.g., Durante, Pinotti, and Tesei 2019;Hoang et al 2016).…”

“…In the light of the relative popularity of the photorealistic and non-photorealistic (quasi-) paradigms, it is interesting how the debate on the virtues of nonphotorealistic rendering has all but disappeared from the recent archaeological literature and, at least to a degree, been replaced by the advocacy for increased transparency of complexity and the documentation of the provenance of what is being visualized and described (e.g., Denard 2012;Huggett 2019;Kastanis 2019). At least on a surface level, these suggestions have much in common with the propositions to make information searching slower (e.g., Teevan et al 2013), more difficult (Huvila 2016), to regulate the excessive affective dependence on specific information technologies (Huvila 2016), and to improve citizens' information literacy (e.g., Welsh and Wright 2010). With some caution, it is perhaps possible to suggest that there is an on-going shift from conceptualizing informational human-technology entanglements as potentially monstrous, impure, and unmanageable technology-dominated cyborgs to, in Latour's (1993) words, convene a Parliament of Things or trying to find means to support and endorse the emergence of "hopeful monsters" (Law 1991, 19) or friendly cyborgs that in a positive sense bring human-beings, technologies, and information together.…”

Archaeological Practices, Knowledge Work and Digitalisation

“…For instance, in seeking and working with information (e.g. Byström et al 2017;Gregg 2011;Huvila 2016), archaeological field documentation, the management of data and collections, and public communication have all changed and are changing with the introduction of digital tools (Börjesson et al 2016), despite sometimes considerable inertia. Even if it would be possible to construct systems that would "respect […] the current workflow of archaeological practice" (Ross et al 2013: 107) it is probably impossible for them to be fully "unobtrusively within existing practices" (Ross et al 2013: 117), even if unobtrusiveness can be seen to be a useful design goal.…”