Imagined Postcolonial Emendations in Searching
Q: How might we imagine Google, its cultural searching assumptions, and its “localization” in search suggestions through a postcolonial discourse?
Fn11. In addition to forthcoming work 🤞, see: @mindyjiang’s “Search concentration, bias, and parochialism” (2014): “When searchers are bounded by “the local,” including its political arrangement, cultural content, and ideological outlook,…
…the diffusion of information, knowledge, and ideas globally through borderless search drifts further away." https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12126
“postcolonial discourse – that is, a discourse centered on the questions of power, authority, legitimacy, participation, and intelligibility in the contexts of cultural encounter, particularly in the context of contemporary globalization.” - Irani et al. (2010)
Original: “Defined by Irani et al.’s (2010) framework of postcolonial computing, ‘‘a project of understanding how all design research and practice is culturally located and power laden,’’ we sought to critically examine the cultural assumptions of blocking technologies…”
Emended: “Defined by Irani et al.’s (2010) framework of postcolonial computing, ‘‘a project of understanding how all design research and practice is culturally located and power laden,’’ we sought to critically examine the cultural assumptions of ["localization"] technologies…”
Irani, L., Vertesi, J., Dourish, P., Philip, K., & Grinter, R. E. (2010). Postcolonial computing: A lens on design and development. Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Chi ’10, 1311. https://doi.org/10.1145/1753326.1753522 [irani2010postcolonial]
Jonas, A., & Burrell, J. (2019). Friction, snake oil, and weird countries: Cybersecurity systems could deepen global inequality through regional blocking. Big Data & Society, 6(1), 2053951719835238. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951719835238 [jonas2019friction]