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theory on demand
Google’s web pages evaluation is thus built on the basis of a ‘public’ referral system which is allegedly the equivalent of the way the ‘scientific community’5 is operating, only not limited to scientists but including all the surfers of the World Wide Web. Today, the organizational workings of the ‘scientific community’ and the issue of data-referencing in general have become crucial problems: in a context of ‘information overflow’,6 especially on the Web, it has become increasingly difficult to estimate not only the importance of information, but also its trustworthiness, the more so since the very principle of peer review as an impact factor has in the meanwhile been questioned by scientists themselves. Amongst the more interesting alternative options are networks of publications available under copyleft, and ‘open access’ projects, which also include research in the domain of the humanities. This was the background to the launch of Page’s ‘spider’ web-exploring program in March 1996 in order to test the pageranking algorithm he had developed. The spider-based search engine of the two talented Stanford students became an instant hit amongst their peers and more senior researchers alike, gaining a wider and extraordinary popularity in the process. However, the bandwidth usage generated by the search engine quickly became a headache for Stanford’s system administrators. Also, owners of indexed sites had some qualms about the intellectual property rights pertaining to their content. Besides that they were not too pleased by the fact that Google’s ranking system rode roughshod over more established evaluation systems – such as prizes and honorary mentions in favor of the number and quality of links (i.e. popularity): Google considers only the relational economy of sites expressed in terms of links, and nothing else. ‘Spider’ couldn’t care less about the content of a page, so to speak. Hence, the value of a search result must be based on the weight of the links between two pages, and not on some arbitrary classification enforced by the terms of the search. This breakthrough
5. The system of scientific publishing was born in 1665 when Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London was first published. The first scientific journal, founded by Henry Oldenburg of the Royal Society of London, was a sort of public registrar of intellectual property, a patent office for scientific ideas, so to speak. The journal sought to introduce clarity and transparency in the evaluation of scientific discoveries by appointing a group of peers had to recognize their ‘intellectual nobility’. This recognition in turn sanctioned the notion of intellectual property. The differential value thus assigned to scientific publications further established a hierarchy of excellence among ‘peers’. Moreover, since scientific discoveries required publicity to be appreciated, publication guidelines became extremely important, and publications became the only means for scientists to gain visibility, fame and prestige. 6. The concept of information deluge (‘déluge informationnel’) has been developed primarily by Pierre Lévy, inspired by Roy Ascott’s notion of ‘second deluge’, as part of a philosophical framework whereby the movement towards ‘virtualization’ acquires a central role, see: Pierre Lévy, Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age. New York: Plenum Trade, 1998 (the original French Sur les chemins du virtuel can be found here: http://hypermedia.univ-paris8.fr/pierre/virtuel/virt0.htm). On his part, Manuel Castells has been writing on ‘informationalism’ and ‘information economy’. A large part of the economic analyses of the information deluge, especially in France, UK and United States, have a Marxist approach based on a debatable interpretation of the web’s ‘collective intelligence’ phenomenon as a hypostasis of the Marxist notion of General Intellect; see for example: Wark McKenzie, A Hacker Manifesto, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.