Fast Facts: Platforms From Personalization to Centralization

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a noticeable shift in the economies of search and information retrieval concerning how the products of giant platform companies consolidate and represent facts directly in their search results. Concomitantly, media, communication, and information scholars have recently refocused on how media technology companies variably create, collect, connect, and commercialize data related to facts about the world and how such processes have implications for how we know the world. Such approaches often counter popular narratives that seek to frame the problems of platforms in terms of personalization and personalized content. While research on the personalization afforded by media is widespread, platforms also engage in the centralization of facts by merging web data representing factual claims and offering answers directly in search engines and virtual assistants’ results and responses (what we refer to as “fast facts”). These processes considerably affect how knowledge is constructed and shared in a networked society. This special issue collects empirical investigative research on the platformization, exploitation, and centralization of facts while offering a variety of perspectives from which to study these developments, including semantic and infrastructural techniques. This article provides an overview of this field and contextualizes recent media studies on search and information retrieval in broader debates around facts and truth claims.

JASIST Special Issue Editorial: Re‐orienting search engine research in information science

“…A recently published special issue of Big Data and Society (Mager et al, 2023) focuses on “The State of Google Critique and Intervention.” The topics covered in this special issue will sound familiar to information science researchers: Methods for investigating offensive search results (Rogers, 2023), data voids and racism (Norocel & Lewandowski, 2023), how Google creates ignorances on the climate crisis (Haider & Rödl, 2023), ethical concerns associated with Google's auto‐complete function (Graham, 2023b), European alternatives to Google (Mager, 2023), as well as conceptual development to nuance the critique “big tech” (Rieder, 2022). In the same year a special issue of Social Media and Society (Iliadis & Ford, 2023) appeared under the title “Semantic Media.” The majority of contributions in this issue concern, in one way or another, search processes, search engines and address their various implications in how meaning and knowledge emerge in society (Dobreski et al, 2023; Ford & Iliadis, 2023; Giomelakis, 2023; Jobin, 2023; Tripodi & Dave, 2023).…”