Search engines as attention condensers make data seem to speak for themselves

Evidence

As a first approximation, a search engine may be described as an attention machine tasked with pre-filtering the immense quantity of information made available to us on the internet. Google is therefore illustrative of the ATTENTION CONDENSERS called for by Herbert Simon in his pioneering 1969 article: ‘An informationprocessing sub-system (a computer or a new organization unit) will reduce the net demand on the rest of the organization’s attention only if it absorbs more information previously received by others than it produces – that is, if it listens and thinks more than it speaks.’ As highlighted by Dominique Cardon, these condensers profoundly alter our relationship to knowledge. Those who know how to hack them are able to offer ways of accessing enormous quantities of data (big data) in such a way that we can visualize millions of heterogeneous behaviour types reduced to a few modular parameters. In this way, we may be led to believe that the data ‘speak for themselves’, shortcircuiting traditional intermediaries like theories, explanatory models and other interpretative schema. It is these visualized condensations ‘that we must examine to begin with, before interpreting’. Our attention is thus brought to bear on absolutely new cognitive and visual objects, whose possibilities, pitfalls and promises we are only just beginning to glimpse. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 214

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘attention condenser’ via Herbert Simon’s 1969 criterion and reports Cardon’s account of how big-data visualization bypasses interpretation.
• XREF: Simon’s attention/wealth-of-information thesis is the canonical lineage running from 1971 economics into today’s attention-economy discourse. — connects to: Search engines froze personal information in permanent foreground of digital identity — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 183; Search engine results are contingent products of corporate economic interests, not inevitable truths. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 184