Google and the Culture of Search

Ken Hillis

ISBN 10: 0415883016 / ISBN 13: 9780415883016

Published by Routledge 2012-07-27, 2012

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 6666-IUK-9780415883016

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Google and the Culture of Search
• Publisher: Routledge 2012-07-27
• Publication Date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0415883016
• ISBN 13: 9780415883016
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

What did you do before Google?

The rise of Google as the dominant Internet search provider reflects a generationally-inflected notion that everything that matters is now on the Web, and should, in the moral sense of the verb, be accessible through search. In this theoretically nuanced study of search technology’s broader implications for knowledge production and social relations, the authors shed light on a culture of search in which our increasing reliance on search engines influences not only the way we navigate, classify, and evaluate Web content, but also how we think about ourselves and the world around us, online and off.

Ken Hillis, Michael Petit, and Kylie Jarrett seek to understand the ascendancy of search and its naturalization by historicizing and contextualizing Google’s dominance of the search industry, and suggest that the contemporary culture of search is inextricably bound up with a metaphysical longing to manage, order, and categorize all knowledge. Calling upon this nexus between political economy and metaphysics, Google and the Culture of Search explores what is at stake for an increasingly networked culture in which search technology is a site of knowledge and power.

About the Author

Ken Hillis is Professor of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is author of Online a Lot of the Time: Ritual, Fetish, Sign , also published by Routledge and Digital Sensations: Space, Identity and Embodiment in Virtual Reality. He is co-editor of Everyday eBay: Culture, Collecting, and Desire, also published by Routledge.

Michael Petit is Program Director, Media Studies and Joint Programme in New Media at University of Toronto Scarborough. He is author of Peacekeepers at War: A Marine's Account of the Beirut Catastrophe and co-editor of Everyday eBay: Culture, Collecting, and Desire.

Kylie Jarrett is Lecturer in Multimedia at the Centre for Media Studies at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, where she is programme coordinator for the BA Digital Media. Her research explores the political economy and discourses of the commercial Web.