Search Engines
Vaidhyanathan, Siva
January 2010
MTWRF, 0930-1200 WB119
Course Description:
This course will consider the ways that the rise of search engines has affected how we view the world, conduct commerce, and communicate. The reading will combine political economy approaches, popular journalistic accounts, and cultural analyses of search engines.
I suggest the following books for preparation for the week we get together. They are not required but would be very helpful for background.
• Alexander Halavais, Search engine society (Cambridge; Malden MA: Polity, 2009).
• John Battelle, The search : how Google and its rivals rewrote the rules of business and transformed our culture (New York: Portfolio, 2005).
• Jeff Jarvis, What would Google do? (New York, NY: Collins Business, 2009).
• Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization Of Everything: How One Company is Transforming Culture, Commerce, and Community -- and Why We Should Worry (Profile Books, 2010). (I will distribute PDFs of this)
Recommended: Watch all the videos here:
• http://world-information.org/wii/deep_search/en/videos
During the week of January 18-22, please read the following (available on the Web and through the library):
For Monday:
• Eszter Hargittai, "The Social, Political, Economic, and Cultural Dimensions of Search Engines: An Introduction," Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12, no. 3 (2007): 1.
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue3/hargittai.html
• Greg Lastowka, "Google's Law," SSRN eLibrary, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1017536.
For Tuesday:
• Michael Zimmer, "The Externalities of Search 2.0: The Emerging Privacy Threats when the Drive for the Perfect Search Engine meets Web 2.0," 2008, 2008, http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2136/1944.
For Wednesday:
• Frank A. Pasquale, "Rankings, Reductionism, and Responsibility," Seton Hall Public Law Research Paper No. 888327 (2006), http://ssrn.com/paper=888327.
For Thursday:
• Randal C. Picker, "Competition and Privacy in Web 2.0 and the Cloud," U of Chicago Law & Economics, no. 414 (June 26, 2008), http://ssrn.com/paper=1151985.
For Friday:
• Frank A. Pasquale and Oren Bracha, "Federal Search Commission? Access, Fairness and Accountability in the Law of Search," Cornell Law Review (September 2008), http://ssrn.com/paper=1002453.
Assignment:
Due Tuesday, January 26 submitted to me via email: Write a 10-page paper analyzing and criticizing two published law review articles that have some bearing on search engine law. Note the intersections, agreements, disagreements, and differences in evidence used by each. Ideally you should highlight a significant gap in the scholarship and propose a study to fill it. Think of this paper as the background section to a law review article you might write.
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Comments (1)
Looks like a neat course! I taught a residential college tutorial (a bit more informal than a regular seminar) on search engines in Spring, 2006. Other than The Search, not much else was available at the time (although there were some pieces about portals more generally speaking, which in earlier days were sometimes almost synonymous with search engines). It was a fun course, but I think I should revisit teaching it again in light of all the great new available material.