Exhibit A: Bing Social Search
Madeleine McGreevy
March 28, 2011
COMS 340
The implementation of online search engines has profoundly changed the ways in which humans and computers store, retrieve, and use informational data. Prior to the keeping of online records and to the implementation of search engines such as Google, or more recently, Bing, records were kept through old-media means such as writing, photography, printing, film, or microfilm, and were retrieved using systems of indexing organized alphabetically or numerically. Recent, new media search engines have permitted immense amounts of digital data to be retrieved through its relation and relevance to key search terms entered by the user. Within the past year, Bing, Google’s impending rival, has refined this process even further by prioritizing the results of a user’s search that are relevant to them socially. This essay will attempt to understand the ways in which Bing’s social search function translates old media record retrieval practices, and thereby alters the relevance of data, alters conceptions of the social, and thereby changes patterns of human activity. These issues will be explored within the context of Lev Manovich’s definitions of new media, of Vannevar Bush’s analysis of the associational nature of the human mind, of Norbert Wiener’s conceptions of cybernetics, and finally of McLuhan’s conceptions of technological consciousness.
The social search function is made possible through the integration of certain functions of Bing and Facebook, which is a part of their larger attempt to challenge Google’s market dominance on internet searches (Singel). The Bing internet searches of users logged onto their Facebook account, who have a feature entitled “instant personalization” enabled, will automatically be social. “Instant personalization” describes the controversial process whereby Facebook partner sites, such as Bing, are able to access a user’s Facebook profile, and use public information to personalize the user’s experience based on social relevance (Gannes). For example, if a user conducts a people search, Bing automatically searches their Facebook social network to determine who may be relevant to the search, based on mutual friends or networks. Once the relevant person is found, the user may see that person’s name, profile picture, network, mutual friends, and is able to send them a message or add them as a friend, all within the Bing search module (see figure one). When users search for web pages, the results will be accompanied by the names and profile pictures of friends who have “Liked” the object (see figure two). Mark Zuckerberg describes this as part of a larger process of web social integration, when he says, “over the next five years, we expect almost every industry will be disrupted by someone building a product which is socially integrated” (Constine).
Lev Manovich’s analysis of new media provides a useful context in which to understand Bing’s social search function as a new media artefact. Manovich, writing in 2002, describes the importance of data processing as one of the central organizing and control technologies of a modern mass society (45). Technologies such as the electric tabulating machine, using punch cards and enumerators, allowed governments and businesses to process data prior to the implementation of the computer and of new media forms (47). New media, according to Manovich, merges the computer and media forms, such as photography or the written word, into one. Such an emergence is dependent upon the ability of media to be translatable into numerical data accessible for computers, which thereby become media processors. Manovich describes how the vast proliferation of such media led to the second stage of a media society which is currently concerned with the need for new automated technologies, such as internet search engines, to store, organize, and efficiently access these media materials (55). Automation of storing, organizing, and accessing of media has led, in part, to the primacy of variability in new media. The logic of variability, integral to Bing social search, describes such processes whereby information about the user, such as that available in their Facebook account, for example, can be used by a computer program to automatically customize the media composition of internet searches .Such principles of automation and variability that are evident in Bing social search, along with others, has led to the emergence of a new computer culture that blends post-industrial human values of individuality and choice with computer meanings (62) .
While Manovich’s analysis situates internet searches in general as new media forms that have emerged out of an attempt to create technologies that store, organize, and access vast media forms in agreement with principles of automation and variability, Vannevar Bush’s discussion of systems of organizing information narrows the focus to elements more specific to Bing’s social search. Bush, writing earlier in 1945, describes, as Manovich does, how the record can only be useful to science if it can be continuously extended, stored, and consulted. He describes how, at the time of his writing, accessing the record efficiently was very difficult due to the artificiality of alphabetically or numerically organized systems of indexing. Information, in this type of system, can only be found, often only in one place, by laboriously tracing it down from subclass to subclass. Bush describes how an alphabetical or numerical system of indexing is quite at odds with the associational nature of the human mind. He describes a hypothetical machine, the “memex” that organizes information by a multitude of linked trails of association. Bing social search does not provide association between topics or subjects as Bush describes, but instead goes beyond this and embeds searches within Facebook social networks, thereby providing association based on online social experience. Bush describes the usefulness of the record for the purposes of science. The records retrieved through Bing social search differ in that they are less oriented to academics and more to building social networks based upon shared friends, networks, or shared “Likes” for music, film, or perhaps television.
It is evident that the automated, personalized variability of Bing social search, along with the ways in which it associates your searches with those in your Facebook social network, combine to form a type of cybernetic system. Norbert Wiener’s conception of cybernetic systems, as explained by N. Katherine Hayles fifty years later in 1999, describes the relation between humans and machines as a self-regulating, homeostatic system of flows of information where boundaries are constructed, rather than given. In the case of Bing social search, the flows of information between human and computer are specific to what is publicly available on Facebook regarding “likes”, and regarding people and their social networks. Boundaries are therefore constructed between those that are in your social network, and those that are not, and between search data that is associated with your social network, and search data that has no association, for example. Wiener often questioned whether humans, animals, and machines have any essential qualities that exist in themselves, apart from the web of relations that constituted them in discursive and communicative fields (91). While Bing does acknowledge the essence of information, meaning that the retrieved data will closely correspond to search terms, the retrieved data that is socially related to the user will be prioritized over data that is not. Data is therefore organized in a way that acknowledges essence, yet whose relevance is dependent upon whether or not it is a part of, or perhaps constituted by, a web of social relations.
Situating Bing social search as part of a complex cybernetic system consisting of unbounded, dematerialized, yet material data flow, brings to mind Marshall McLuhan’s concept of media as translators. McLuhan, writing in 1964, describes how humans are increasingly being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness. He describes how this translation process will perhaps unite the entire globe under a single consciousness (50). Bing social search similarly acts to translate the physical social realm into the online, information based, social realm. In this realm, a single human consciousness may be forming, as users are perhaps encouraged to conform their “likes” with that of their social network. Social interactions such as sharing your music interests with friends, are partially delegated to the disembodied online realm, where your interests are revealed by the “like” function, and can be discovered by your social network on Bing without any sort of face to face interaction.
To conclude, it is evident that Bing social search has translated old media record retrieval processes in complex ways that have that have prioritized socially relevant data. This process has relied upon mechanisms of automation and variability, on associational organization of data, and can best be understood as a variant of a cybernetic system that relies upon the translation of the human realm into the informational realm. Our conception of the social has consequently been affected as more and more social functions, such as sharing musical interests, for example, are delegated online into abstracted, disembodied, simplified forms. Perhaps this is an anti-social phenomenon, whereby we are able to sit behind our computer screens, alone, and discover the interests of our social network without uttering a word, or even without their awareness that we are doing so. Or, perhaps being able to discover the interests of our social network through search engines allows us to become more socially integrated, or perhaps more homogenized. Whatever the case, it remains that the social is being reformulated with the explosion of socially integrated internet software. The delegation of aspects of the social to the online realm benefits those who profit from selling social information to advertisers, such as companies like Bing or Facebook. Finally, it is crucial to understand who is being excluded from this process, such as those without literacy, or without computer or internet access, for example, and furthermore to understand those that may become more integrated within this new social process, such as those with physical disabilities, for example.
Works Cited
Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think”. The Atlantic. July, 1945. Web. March 19, 2011.
Constine, Josh. “Facebook Instant Personalization Comes to Bing Web and People Search”. Inside Facebook. Inside Network, Inc. 13 October, 2010. Web. March 19, 2011.
Gannes, Liz. “Bing Launches Facebook Instant Personalization”. GigaOM. 13 October 2010. Web. March 19, 2011.
Hayles, Katherine N. “Liberal Subjectivity Imperiled: Norbert Wiener and Cybernetic Anxiety”. How we Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. Print.
Manovich, Lev. “How Media Became New” and “Principles of New Media”. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. Print.
McLuhan, Marshall. “Media as Translators”. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. 1964. Print. Singel, Ryan. “Bing Friends Facebook”. Wired. Condé Nast Digital, 13 October 2010. Web. March 18 2011.
Plate List
Figure Two: Web Page Search
