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Many of those systems were originally designed to sell consumer products; how is that shaping our societies, and can we do anything about it? Are there viable alternatives to filtering, search, and indexing systems that stem from the logic and demands of capitalism?
MIT researcher Rodrigo Ochigame explores these questions through a combination of historical investigation and practical experimentation, looking to alternatives that have existed in the past and those which might be cultivated in the present.
Ochigame became interested in issues of algorithmic fairness and information retrieval while living in Brazil. A dispute over land rights there saw both indigenous activists and the agribusiness lobby using digital media to mobilise. Ochigame’s study of social media found that the dominant platforms favoured the agribusiness side.
“The predominant logics of filtering are ones of popularity and similarity,” Ochigame says. “The things that appear on a feed, those which are more likely to be deemed relevant in search results, are determined largely by metrics of popularity and of similarity to what the user has already seen or liked before.” Ochigame explains how indigenous
activists found creative tactics to circumvent the filters impeding their online goals, such as changing their surnames on Facebook: “Last names aren’t filtered the same way as other parts of the feed, so they changed their names to ‘Guarani-Kaiowá’, the name of the group that was engaged in the land struggle. That particular tactic catalysed a surge in visibility for their cause and triggered what I believe were the largest public demonstrations and street protests for Indigenous land recovery in Brazilian history.”
Informational wealth The case gave Ochigame a sense of urgency about the need for alternative
July-August 2021
Are there viable alternatives to filtering, search, and indexing systems that stem from the logic and demands of capitalism?
OW do biases in systems which manage the circulation of information affect the world we live in?
ways of indexing, searching, and circulating information. In the archives, he found intriguing examples from socialist Cuba and Latin American liberation theology. In Castro’s Cuba, information scientists sought to understand how “informational wealth” could be distributed along similar lines to the redistribution of material wealth under socialism. They critiqued existing metrics of scholarly productivity and even developed their own assembly language for the Cuban-made CID-201 computer. In 1970s Latin America, liberation theologians sought to foster critical consciousness among their communities, but faced restrictions on international travel and severe state censorship of media. In response, they developed their own postal “intercommunication network”. Short texts were received and distributed from hubs in Rio de Janeiro and Paris, according to principles of radical equality: “All must be able to speak and be listened to regardless of the hierarchical position, level of education or experience, social function or position, moral, intellectual, or political authority of each.”
While Cuban informatics and the liberation theologians’ “intercommunication network” both ultimately collapsed, for Ochigame they are a reminder that the dominant systems of the 2020s are not beyond challenge.
“Anti-capitalist approaches to informatics have existed since the beginning of the field,” he says, “but didn’t become predominant because they didn’t serve the purposes of the biggest sponsors of research: corporations, particularly in the advertising business, and the military.” His current research includes contributing to the Relata project, developing alternative metrics for the analysis of scholarly citations: “If you use a dominant system like Google Scholar, for example, the relevance of results is determined largely by metrics of citation popularity, like citation counts, and similarity, in terms of citation clusters.”
Matt Finch (@drmattfinch) is a writer and consultant who specialises in strategy, foresight, and innovation work with institutions worldwide. See more at www.
mechanicaldolphin.com
An expression of hope Relata builds on feminist and anti- racist critique within library and information science. Existing citation metrics reproduce patterns of exclusion and marginalisation, its researchers argue, so what are the viable alternatives to ranking by popularity and similarity in bibliographic search? “Relata is an attempt to produce an alternative kind of metadata,” Ochigame explains, “that focuses on analytical moves and relations that are often excluded from citations, such as absences, critiques, re-analyses.” For him, a necessary step in challenging the assumptions of dominant information systems is to “de-naturalise the basic premises of the theories and methods” underlying them: “a real reckoning with the implications of these systems must get to their most basic premises”. Will Relata and similar projects transform the informational worlds we live in, or go the way of prior attempts to sustain alternative models? Ochigame’s work is an expression of hope despite future uncertainty: “Making alternatives available or more visible through a combination of history, ethnography, and design is clearly a necessary step in this change, and that’s enough to keep me going for now. Whether alternative models will find wide adoption in any future context, I cannot predict, but at least I can try to help make them available.” IP
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https://relata.mit.edu/ INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL DIGITAL 41
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