DOCSLIB.ORG

A Deeper Investigation of the Importance of Wikipedia Links to the Success of Search Engines*

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
A Deeper Investigation of the Importance of Wikipedia Links to the Success of Search Engines* A Deeper Investigation of the Importance of Wikipedia Links to the Success of Search Engines* Nicholas Vincent Brent Hecht Northwestern University Northwestern University Evanston, IL, USA Evanston, IL, USA [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT patterns, and content outcomes being imperative to the success of Google Search. Conversely, Google is known to be a key source of A growing body of work has highlighted the important role that traffic – both readers and potential editors – to Wikipedia [13]. Wikipedia’s volunteer-created content plays in helping search In this paper, we replicate and extend earlier work that engines achieve their core goal of addressing the information identified the importance of Wikipedia to the success of search needs of millions of people. In this paper, we report the results of engines but was limited in that it focused only on desktop results an investigation into the incidence of Wikipedia links in search for Google and treated those results as a ranked list, i.e. as “ten engine results pages (SERPs). Our results extend prior work by blue links” [2]. As in this earlier work, we collect the first SERP considering three U.S. search engines, simulating both mobile and for a variety of important queries and ask, “How often do desktop devices, and using a spatial analysis approach designed to Wikipedia links appear and where are these links appearing study modern SERPs that are no longer just “ten blue links”. We within SERPs?” However, our work includes three critical find that Wikipedia links are extremely common in important extensions that provide us with a deeper view into the role search contexts, appearing in 67-84% of all SERPs for common and Wikipedia links play in helping search engines achieve their trending queries, but less ofen for medical queries. Furthermore, primary goals. First, we consider three popular search engines – we observe that Wikipedia links ofen appear in “Knowledge Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo – rather than just Google. Panel” SERP elements and are in positions visible to users without Second, in light of growing search engine use on mobile devices scrolling, although Wikipedia appears less in prominent positions [29], we simulate queries from both desktop and mobile devices. on mobile devices. Our findings reinforce the complementary Third, we built software to allow us to use a spatial approach to notions that (1) Wikipedia content and research has major impact search auditing that is more compatible with modern SERPs, outside of the Wikipedia domain and (2) powerful technologies which have moved away from the traditional “10 blue links”; like search engines are highly reliant on free content created by SERPs now have “knowledge panels” in a second, right-hand volunteers. column, “featured answers”, social media “carousels”, and other elements. We are sharing our code package to support additional CCS CONCEPTS search audits taking this approach.1 • Human-centered computing~Empirical studies in collaborative Relatedly, because search engines are proprietary, opaque, and social computing and subject to frequent changes (e.g. Google very recently underwent a major redesign [21]), it is critical to validate that data KEYWORDS being used for quantitative search auditing analysis accurately Wikipedia, search engines, user-generated content, data as labor reflects how SERPs appear to users. Our spatial approach to SERP * Tis is a pre-print of a paper accepted to the non-archival track of the analysis allows us to easily visually compare the representation of WikiWorkshop at the Web Conference 2020. our SERP data to screenshots of SERPs. We find that the results identified in prior work regarding Google desktop search largely extend to other search engines and 1 Introduction to mobile devices. For instance, Wikipedia appeared in 81-84% of Previous work has highlighted critical interdependencies SERPs for our common queries, 67-72% for our trending queries, between Wikipedia and Google Search. For many query and 16-54% for our medical queries. Furthermore, using our spatial categories, Wikipedia links appear more than any other website analysis approach, we observe that for many of these queries, on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) [26]. This Wikipedia appears in the prominent area of SERPs visible without suggests that Wikipedia is playing an essential role in helping scrolling, through both Knowledge Panel elements and traditional Google Search achieve its core function of addressing information blue links. However, we also observe differences between desktop needs. It also raises the stakes of Wikipedia-related research and mobile SERPs, with Wikipedia appearing less prominently for findings, with Wikipedia’s collaboration processes, contribution mobile SERPs. 1 https://github.com/nickmvincent/se-scraper N. Vincent and B. Hecht Our results have implications for a variety of constituencies. 18]. Estimated incidence rates range from 34% to 99%, depending Past work suggested that Wikipedia was highly important to on the choice of queries (a point to which we will return below). Google users: good aspects (e.g. high-quality knowledge) and bad aspects (e.g. content biases [17]) of the Wikipedia community are amplified by Google. Our results suggest that this relationship 3 Methods extends beyond just desktop users of Google, and for some cases As mentioned above, modern SERPs include SERP (e.g. DuckDuckGo’s medical SERPs), Wikipedia is even more components that are much more complicated than “ten blue important. links”. These multifaceted SERPs pose challenges to ranking- Finally, our results also reinforce the importance of based approaches used in prior work, such Vincent et al.’s study volunteer-created data to intelligent technologies. By measuring which focused on using the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) styles to how often and where Wikipedia links appear in SERPs, we can differentiate different result types (e.g. blue link vs. Knowledge better understand how the volunteer labor underlying Wikipedia Panel vs. News Carousel) and create a ranked list of these results fuels search engines, some of the most important and widely used [26]. The critical challenge with "ranking list” approaches is that intelligent technologies. they cannot account for (1) the fact that SERP elements come in a variety of sizes and (2) the fact that SERP elements appear in a separate right-hand column. 2 Related Work In contrast to prior work, we consider every link (i.e. each This paper builds on a variety of research that has studied HTML <a> element) in each SERP and look at the coordinate for search engines and SERPs, as well as research that has specifically each link, in pixels, relative to the top left corner of the SERP, an studied the role of Wikipedia articles in search results. approach specifically designed to handle modern SERPs. There are In McMahon et al.’s 2017 experimental study [13], a browser several other high-level benefits to this approach. It is easier to extension hid Wikipedia links from Google users and the authors analyze multiple search engines (the approach requires observed a large drop in click-through rate, possibly the most substantially less hard-coded rules based on CSS styles), and we important search success metric [7]. This study, and follow up can visually validate that are the representation of SERP data we work from Vincent et al. [26], which measured the prevalence of analyze reflects the appearance of modern, component-heavy user-generated content in SERPs, were motivated by a call from SERPs. the Wikimedia Foundation to study the re-use of Wikipedia Below, we detail our data collection, validation, and analysis content [24]. pipeline, and expand on the benefits of this spatial approach to These studies are part of a broader body of search auditing SERP analysis. literature, which has used auditing techniques (i.e. collecting the outputs of search engines) to study aspects of search such as 3.1 Search Engines and Queries personalization and the components of SERPs [8, 11, 19]. Notably, In this work, we focus on three U.S. based search engines: in a study that focused on political SERPs, Robertson et al. [19] Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo. Google and Bing are the two most identified a large number of Wikipedia articles in the SERP data popular search engines in the United States, while DuckDuckGo they collected, in line with the results from Vincent et al.’s user- is the most popular privacy-focused search engine [27]. Market generated content-focused study. Related work has focused share estimates from different analytics services vary. For January specifically on the complexities of SERP elements like the 2020, analytics company StatCounter estimates Google served Knowledge Panel [12, 20]. Lurie and Mustafaraj identified that 81% of desktop queries, Bing served 12%, and DuckDuckGo served Wikipedia played a critical role in populating the “Knowledge 1.5%, and for mobile devices Google served 95%, Bing served 1.5%, Panel” shown in Google SERPs: queries about news source with and DuckDuckGo served 1.2% [23]. Data from marketing research Wikipedia articles frequently had a Knowledge Panel in the company ComScore suggests Bing has a more substantial market corresponding SERP [12]. Rothschild et al. studied how Wikipedia share: Google served about 62% of desktop search queries, while links in Google Knowledge Panel components influenced user Bing served about 25% [3]. perception of online news [20]. Following past work [8, 26], we selected categories of queries The study that we most directly replicate and extend is that are particularly important to search users. We consider Vincent et al.’s 2019 study, which used a ranking-based analysis queries from three important query categories: common queries, to examine the role user-generated content played in search trending queries, and medical queries. Common queries are made results for the desktop version of Google search, and found that very frequently.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • 4€€€€An Encyclopedia with Breaking News
    Wikipedia @ 20 • ::Wikipedia @ 20 4 An Encyclopedia with Breaking News Brian Keegan Published on: Oct 15, 2020 Updated on: Nov 16, 2020 License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0) Wikipedia @ 20 • ::Wikipedia @ 20 4 An Encyclopedia with Breaking News Wikipedia’s response to the September 11 attacks profoundly shaped its rules and identity and illuminated a new strategy for growing the project by coupling the supply and demand for information about news. Wikipedia’s breaking news collaborations offer lessons for hardening other online platforms against polarization, disinformation, and other sociotechnical sludge. The web was a very different place for news in the United States between 2001 and 2006. The hanging chads from the 2000 presidential election, the spectacular calamity of 9/11, the unrepentant lies around Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the campy reality television featuring Donald Trump were all from this time. The burst of the dot-com bubble and corporate malfeasance of companies like Enron dampened entrepreneurial spirits, news publishers were optimistically sharing their stories online without paywalls, and blogging was heralded as the future of technology-mediated accountability and participatory democracy. “You” was Time Magazine’s Person of the Year in 2006 because “Web 2.0” platforms like YouTube, MySpace, and Second Life had become tools for “bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter.”1 Wikipedia was a part of this primordial soup, predating news-feed-mediated engagement, recommender-driven polarization, politicized content moderation, and geopolitical disinformation campaigns. From very early in its history, Wikipedia leveraged the supply and demand for information about breaking news and current events into strategies that continue to sustain this radical experiment in online peer production.
    [Show full text]
  • Modeling and Analyzing Latency in the Memcached System
    Modeling and Analyzing Latency in the Memcached system Wenxue Cheng1, Fengyuan Ren1, Wanchun Jiang2, Tong Zhang1 1Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology, Beijing, China 1Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China 2School of Information Science and Engineering, Central South University, Changsha, China March 27, 2017 abstract Memcached is a widely used in-memory caching solution in large-scale searching scenarios. The most pivotal performance metric in Memcached is latency, which is affected by various factors including the workload pattern, the service rate, the unbalanced load distribution and the cache miss ratio. To quantitate the impact of each factor on latency, we establish a theoretical model for the Memcached system. Specially, we formulate the unbalanced load distribution among Memcached servers by a set of probabilities, capture the burst and concurrent key arrivals at Memcached servers in form of batching blocks, and add a cache miss processing stage. Based on this model, algebraic derivations are conducted to estimate latency in Memcached. The latency estimation is validated by intensive experiments. Moreover, we obtain a quantitative understanding of how much improvement of latency performance can be achieved by optimizing each factor and provide several useful recommendations to optimal latency in Memcached. Keywords Memcached, Latency, Modeling, Quantitative Analysis 1 Introduction Memcached [1] has been adopted in many large-scale websites, including Facebook, LiveJournal, Wikipedia, Flickr, Twitter and Youtube. In Memcached, a web request will generate hundreds of Memcached keys that will be further processed in the memory of parallel Memcached servers. With this parallel in-memory processing method, Memcached can extensively speed up and scale up searching applications [2].
    [Show full text]
  • Writing History in the Digital Age
    :ULWLQJ+LVWRU\LQWKH'LJLWDO$JH -DFN'RXJKHUW\.ULVWHQ1DZURW]NL 3XEOLVKHGE\8QLYHUVLW\RI0LFKLJDQ3UHVV -DFN'RXJKHUW\DQG.ULVWHQ1DZURW]NL :ULWLQJ+LVWRU\LQWKH'LJLWDO$JH $QQ$UERU8QLYHUVLW\RI0LFKLJDQ3UHVV 3URMHFW086( :HE6HSKWWSPXVHMKXHGX For additional information about this book http://muse.jhu.edu/books/9780472029914 Access provided by University of Notre Dame (10 Jan 2016 18:25 GMT) 2RPP The Wikiblitz A Wikipedia Editing Assignment in a First- Year Undergraduate Class Shawn Graham In this essay, I describe an experiment conducted in the 2010 academic year at Carleton University, in my first- year seminar class on digital his- tory. This experiment was designed to explore how knowledge is created and represented on Wikipedia, by working to improve a single article. The overall objective of the class was to give students an understanding of how historians can create “signal” in the “noise” of the Internet and how historians create knowledge using digital media tools. Given that doing “research” online often involves selecting a resource suggested by Google (generally one within the first three to five results),1 this class had larger media literacy goals as well. The students were drawn from all areas of the university, with the only stipulation being that they had to be in their first year. The positive feedback loops inherent in the World Wide Web’s struc- ture greatly influence the way history is consumed, disseminated, and cre- ated online. Google’s algorithms will retrieve an article from Wikipedia, typically displaying it as one of the first links on the results page. Some- one somewhere will decide that the information is “wrong,” and he (it is typically a he)2 will “fix” the information, clicking on the “edit” button to make the change.
    [Show full text]
  • The Culture of Wikipedia
    Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia Good Faith Collaboration The Culture of Wikipedia Joseph Michael Reagle Jr. Foreword by Lawrence Lessig The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Web edition, Copyright © 2011 by Joseph Michael Reagle Jr. CC-NC-SA 3.0 Purchase at Amazon.com | Barnes and Noble | IndieBound | MIT Press Wikipedia's style of collaborative production has been lauded, lambasted, and satirized. Despite unease over its implications for the character (and quality) of knowledge, Wikipedia has brought us closer than ever to a realization of the centuries-old Author Bio & Research Blog pursuit of a universal encyclopedia. Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia is a rich ethnographic portrayal of Wikipedia's historical roots, collaborative culture, and much debated legacy. Foreword Preface to the Web Edition Praise for Good Faith Collaboration Preface Extended Table of Contents "Reagle offers a compelling case that Wikipedia's most fascinating and unprecedented aspect isn't the encyclopedia itself — rather, it's the collaborative culture that underpins it: brawling, self-reflexive, funny, serious, and full-tilt committed to the 1. Nazis and Norms project, even if it means setting aside personal differences. Reagle's position as a scholar and a member of the community 2. The Pursuit of the Universal makes him uniquely situated to describe this culture." —Cory Doctorow , Boing Boing Encyclopedia "Reagle provides ample data regarding the everyday practices and cultural norms of the community which collaborates to 3. Good Faith Collaboration produce Wikipedia. His rich research and nuanced appreciation of the complexities of cultural digital media research are 4. The Puzzle of Openness well presented.
    [Show full text]
  • Seniors' Stories | Volume 4
    Seniors’ Stories Seniors’ Stories Volume 4 Volume Volume 4 FRONT COVER: OPEN CATEGORY WINNING ENTRY Angus Lee Forbes Ilona was named after her Great Grandmother, a truly great woman. Born in Hungary, she arrived in Australia during the onset of World War Two. Ninety years and four generations separate the two. Connected by name, both adore spending time with one another. Acknowledgements This collection of 100 stories is the fourth volume of Seniors Stories written by seniors from throughout NSW. The theme of this year’s edition was positive ageing and each story reflects this theme in its own unique and inspiring way. NSW Seniors Card would like to thank the 100 authors whose stories are published in this volume of Seniors Stories, as well as the many other seniors who contributed to the overwhelming number and quality of stories received. Thanks also to contributing editor, Colleen Parker, Fellowship of Australian Writers NSW, and those involved in the design and printing of the book. Seniors’ Stories – Volume 4 1 A message from the Premier Welcome to the fourth edition of Seniors’ Stories. Older people have an extraordinary influence on our The stories in this publication are a great example community; they are the backbone of many of our of the wisdom, talent and ability of our extraordinary voluntary organisations and play a vital role in our seniors in NSW. families and neighbourhoods. The theme of this year’s book is Positive Ageing Seniors’ Stories is just one way of recognising and and the stories showcase the vast range of positive valuing the experiences of older people in NSW experiences and invaluable contributions that older and building connections between young and old.
    [Show full text]
  • PDF of Paper
    The Substantial Interdependence of Wikipedia and Google: A Case Study on the Relationship Between Peer Production Communities and Information Technologies Connor McMahon1*, Isaac Johnson2*, and Brent Hecht2 *indicates co-First Authors; 1GroupLens Research, University of Minnesota; 2People, Space, and Algorithms (PSA) Computing Group, Northwestern University [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] Abstract broader information technology ecosystem. This ecosystem While Wikipedia is a subject of great interest in the com- contains potentially critical relationships that could affect puting literature, very little work has considered Wikipedia’s Wikipedia as much as or more than any changes to internal important relationships with other information technologies sociotechnical design. For example, in order for a Wikipedia like search engines. In this paper, we report the results of two page to be edited, it needs to be visited, and search engines deception studies whose goal was to better understand the critical relationship between Wikipedia and Google. These may be a prominent mediator of Wikipedia visitation pat- studies silently removed Wikipedia content from Google terns. If this is the case, search engines may also play a crit- search results and examined the effect of doing so on partici- ical role in helping Wikipedia work towards the goal of pants’ interactions with both websites. Our findings demon- “[providing] every single person on the planet [with] access strate and characterize an extensive interdependence between to the sum of all human knowledge” (Wales 2004). Wikipedia and Google. Google becomes a worse search en- gine for many queries when it cannot surface Wikipedia con- Also remaining largely unexamined are the inverse rela- tent (e.g.
    [Show full text]
  • PDF Preprint
    A Deeper Investigation of the Importance of Wikipedia Links to Search Engine Results NICHOLAS VINCENT, Northwestern University, USA BRENT HECHT, Northwestern University, USA A growing body of work has highlighted the important role that Wikipedia’s volunteer-created content plays in helping search engines achieve their core goal of addressing the information needs of hundreds of millions of people. In this paper, we report the results of an investigation into the incidence of Wikipedia links in search engine results pages (SERPs). Our results extend prior work by considering three U.S. search engines, simulating both mobile and desktop devices, and using a spatial analysis approach designed to study modern SERPs that are no longer just “ten blue links”. We find that Wikipedia links are extremely common in important search contexts, appearing in 67-84% of desktop SERPs for common and trending queries, but less often for medical queries. Furthermore, we observe that Wikipedia links often appear in “Knowledge Panel” SERP elements and are in positions visible to users without scrolling, although Wikipedia appears less often and in less prominent positions on mobile devices. Our findings reinforce the complementary notions that (1) Wikipedia content and research has major impact outside of the Wikipedia domain and (2) powerful technologies like search engines are highly reliant on free content 4 created by volunteers. CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing KEYWORDS Wikipedia; search engines; user-generated content; data leverage ACM Reference Format: Nicholas Vincent and Brent Hecht. 2021. A Deeper Investigation of the Importance of Wikipedia Links to Search Engine Results.
    [Show full text]
  • Why Are Some Websites Researched More Than Others? a Review of Research Into the Global Top Twenty Mike Thelwall
    Why are some websites researched more than others? A review of research into the global top twenty Mike Thelwall How to cite this article: Thelwall, Mike (2020). “Why are some websites researched more than others? A review of research into the global top twenty”. El profesional de la información, v. 29, n. 1, e290101. https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2020.ene.01 Manuscript received on 28th September 2019 Accepted on 15th October 2019 Mike Thelwall * https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6065-205X University of Wolverhampton, Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group Wulfruna Street Wolverhampton WV1 1LY, UK [email protected] Abstract The web is central to the work and social lives of a substantial fraction of the world’s population, but the role of popular websites may not always be subject to academic scrutiny. This is a concern if social scientists are unable to understand an aspect of users’ daily lives because one or more major websites have been ignored. To test whether popular websites may be ignored in academia, this article assesses the volume and citation impact of research mentioning any of twenty major websites. The results are consistent with the user geographic base affecting research interest and citation impact. In addition, site affordances that are useful for research also influence academic interest. Because of the latter factor, however, it is not possible to estimate the extent of academic knowledge about a site from the number of publications that mention it. Nevertheless, the virtual absence of international research about some globally important Chinese and Russian websites is a serious limitation for those seeking to understand reasons for their web success, the markets they serve or the users that spend time on them.
    [Show full text]
  • THE ARGUMENT ENGINE While Wikipedia Critics Are Becoming Ever More Colorful in Their Metaphors, Wikipedia Is Not the Only Reference Work to Receive Such Scrutiny
    14 CRITICAL POINT OF VIEW A Wikipedia Reader ENCYCLOPEDIC KNOWLEDGE 15 THE ARGUMENT ENGINE While Wikipedia critics are becoming ever more colorful in their metaphors, Wikipedia is not the only reference work to receive such scrutiny. To understand criticism about Wikipedia, JOSEPH REAGLE especially that from Gorman, it is useful to first consider the history of reference works relative to the varied motives of producers, their mixed reception by the public, and their interpreta- tion by scholars. In a Wired commentary by Lore Sjöberg, Wikipedia production is characterized as an ‘argu- While reference works are often thought to be inherently progressive, a legacy perhaps of ment engine’ that is so powerful ‘it actually leaks out to the rest of the web, spontaneously the famous French Encyclopédie, this is not always the case. Dictionaries were frequently forming meta-arguments about itself on any open message board’. 1 These arguments also conceived of rather conservatively. For example, when the French Academy commenced leak into, and are taken up by the champions of, the print world. For example, Michael Gor- compiling a national dictionary in the 17th century, it was with the sense that the language man, former president of the American Library Association, uses Wikipedia as an exemplar had reached perfection and should therefore be authoritatively ‘fixed’, as if set in stone. 6 of a dangerous ‘Web 2.0’ shift in learning. I frame such criticism of Wikipedia by way of a Also, encyclopedias could be motivated by conservative ideologies. Johann Zedler wrote in historical argument: Wikipedia, like other reference works before it, has triggered larger social his 18th century encyclopedia that ‘the purpose of the study of science… is nothing more anxieties about technological and social change.
    [Show full text]
  • Situating Wikipedia As a Health Information Resource in Various Contexts: a Scoping Review
    Western University Scholarship@Western FIMS Publications Information & Media Studies (FIMS) Faculty Winter 2-19-2020 Situating Wikipedia as a health information resource in various contexts: A scoping review Denise Smith Western University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fimspub Part of the Library and Information Science Commons Citation of this paper: Smith, Denise, "Situating Wikipedia as a health information resource in various contexts: A scoping review" (2020). FIMS Publications. 341. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fimspub/341 RESEARCH ARTICLE Situating Wikipedia as a health information resource in various contexts: A scoping review 1,2 Denise A. SmithID * 1 Health Sciences Library, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, 2 Faculty of Information & Media Studies, Western University, London, Ontario, Canada * [email protected] a1111111111 a1111111111 Abstract a1111111111 a1111111111 Background a1111111111 Wikipedia's health content is the most frequently visited resource for health information on the internet. While the literature provides strong evidence for its high usage, a comprehen- sive literature review of Wikipedia's role within the health context has not yet been reported. OPEN ACCESS Objective Citation: Smith DA (2020) Situating Wikipedia as a health information resource in various contexts: A To conduct a comprehensive review of peer-reviewed, published literature to learn what the scoping review. PLoS ONE 15(2): e0228786. existing body of literature says about Wikipedia as a health information resource and what https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0228786 publication trends exist, if any. Editor: Stefano Triberti, University of Milan, ITALY Received: October 17, 2019 Methods Accepted: January 22, 2020 A comprehensive literature search in OVID Medline, OVID Embase, CINAHL, LISTA, Wil- Published: February 18, 2020 son's Web, AMED, and Web of Science was performed.
    [Show full text]
  • Critical Point of View: a Wikipedia Reader
    w ikipedia pedai p edia p Wiki CRITICAL POINT OF VIEW A Wikipedia Reader 2 CRITICAL POINT OF VIEW A Wikipedia Reader CRITICAL POINT OF VIEW 3 Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader Editors: Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz Editorial Assistance: Ivy Roberts, Morgan Currie Copy-Editing: Cielo Lutino CRITICAL Design: Katja van Stiphout Cover Image: Ayumi Higuchi POINT OF VIEW Printer: Ten Klei Groep, Amsterdam Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2011 A Wikipedia ISBN: 978-90-78146-13-1 Reader EDITED BY Contact GEERT LOVINK AND Institute of Network Cultures NATHANIEL TKACZ phone: +3120 5951866 INC READER #7 fax: +3120 5951840 email: [email protected] web: http://www.networkcultures.org Order a copy of this book by sending an email to: [email protected] A pdf of this publication can be downloaded freely at: http://www.networkcultures.org/publications Join the Critical Point of View mailing list at: http://www.listcultures.org Supported by: The School for Communication and Design at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (Hogeschool van Amsterdam DMCI), the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in Bangalore and the Kusuma Trust. Thanks to Johanna Niesyto (University of Siegen), Nishant Shah and Sunil Abraham (CIS Bangalore) Sabine Niederer and Margreet Riphagen (INC Amsterdam) for their valuable input and editorial support. Thanks to Foundation Democracy and Media, Mondriaan Foundation and the Public Library Amsterdam (Openbare Bibliotheek Amsterdam) for supporting the CPOV events in Bangalore, Amsterdam and Leipzig. (http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/cpov/) Special thanks to all the authors for their contributions and to Cielo Lutino, Morgan Currie and Ivy Roberts for their careful copy-editing.
    [Show full text]
  • US Economic Growth Is Over: the Short Run Meets the Long Run
    US Economic Growth is Over: The Short Run Meets the Long Run Robert Gordon Stanley G. Harris Professor in the Social Sciences, Northwestern University; NBER Distinguishing Between Secular No single image captures the present concern about secular stagnation and slowing Stagnation and Slow Long-term long-term economic growth better than The Growth Economist cover of July 19, 2014, showing a frustrated jockey dressed in the colors of the set of lively debates about future U.S. econom- American flag frantically trying to get some ic growth has engaged me as the lonely pro- movement from the gigantic but sluggish turtle Aponent of pessimism about the future against that he is riding. U.S. real GDP growth has grown three very talented proponents of what I have called at a turtle-like pace of only 2.1 percent per year in “techno-optimism.” In their best-selling book The the last four years, despite a rapid decline in the Second Machine Age (2013), Erik Brynjolfsson and unemployment rate from 10 to 6 percent. Almost all of that improvement in the unemployment rate Andrew McAfee have argued that the U.S. is at a has been offset by an unprecedented decline in “point of inflection” toward faster technological labor force participation, so that the ratio of change. In two public debates with them, I have lost employment to the working-age population has overwhelmingly; the techno-optimists have cap- hardly improved at all since the trough of the tured a consensus view that the future will be better recession, and as a result 10 million jobs have than the past, and that hope is understandable be- been lost forever.2 cause economic conditions in the U.S.
    [Show full text]