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Short abstract:

Drawing on a digital ethnography with a group of students, in this presentation I put forth ‘critical feminist screenshotting’, an STS method that visualises the search results of black-boxed algorithms as ‘partial perspectives’ (Haraway 1998), offering an alternative ‘way of (machinic) seeing’.

Long abstract:

‘Ubiquitous googling’ (Ridgway 2021) with keywords is a new media habit (Chun 2016), serving as a window into users’ thoughts, interests and desires. Although Google promotes itself as a neutral purveyor of information (Introna and Nissenbaum 2000), with its commercial search activities it prioritizes results predicated on a variety of factors that are anything but objective or value free (Noble 2018:65). Operating as an ‘increasing invisible information infrastructure’ (Haider & Sundin, 2019), many people cannot tell the difference between paid advertising and ‘organic’ search results, with most users staying above the ‘fold’ (Introna 2016, Lewandowski 2017:22). Transient as well as opaque, what are some of the criteria determining search results and how can they be captured and better understood?

In order to gain insight into how Google’s search ecosystem works, a digital ethnography investigates the ‘personalization’ of search results and whether results differ between people. A feminist lens of analysis exposes the technical front-end and some of the socio-political workings and repercussions. Although screenshots are often considered documentary and evidentiary, they are also ‘operational images’ (Faroki 2004, Parikka 2023) that capture the ‘gaze of the search engine’ (Noble 2018:71,116). Combining praxis and theory as an intervention in design justice, 'critical feminist screenshotting' engenders what Haraway describes as a ‘partial perspective’, arguing for ‘politics and epistemologies of location, positioning and situating’ (1988). This practice of ‘feminist objectivity’ contributes to STS methods by privileging ‘contestation of webbed connections’ against a dominant Western, white and male ‘god view’ [Google] of infinite vision.