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Created: July 13, 2003
Latest Update: July 13, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Staged Public Sphere Performance

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, July 2003.
"Fair use" encouraged.

This essay was prompted by an article alert from the Wall Street Journal on Monday, Juky 14, 2003: Yahoo Agrees to Acquire Overture for $1.63 Billion A Wall Street Journal Online News Roundup. You have to be a paid subscriber to access this story. Profit!

Here's a small part of what makes me crazy:

The real stock play took off in Internet projects when startups figured out how to make money from what was originally an information sharing and research "information highway." Remember when Gore said that? Then profit reared its ugly head and went unchecked. My work this morning was interrupted by a news alert from the Wall Street Journal that Yahoo has just bought an advertising company for selling privileged space on its search results. My first thought was that perhaps I'll finally have to modernize and switch to Google. I should have known better. My trust in the corporate world is slipping irretrievably away.

Here's a small part of what makes me crazy:

"How Paid Search Works"

"The hottest category in search marketing is paid listings -- short text advertisements, with links to the advertiser's site, that appear on the pages that display the results of an Internet search. In most cases, these paid placements are clearly identified and separated from the standard search results.

"Advertisers bid for placement on a results page in terms of how much they will pay the search engine every time someone clicks on their ad. Minimum bids vary, but the range of bidding usually starts at five cents a click, marketers say.

"Generally, the highest bid wins the most prominent display on the page, with the rest of the advertisers listed in descending order of their bids. You may have to rebid occasionally to maintain your rank, if a higher bid comes in.

"The major sellers of paid listings -- Overture and Google -- then license these listings to other Web sites. The revenue generated from the ads is then split between the provider and the Web site."

Updated July 14, 2003 3:14 p.m.

When this message came in I was at work on a review of a social epistemology article on the extent to which our "knowing" is influenced by social conditions. (Merold Westphal, "Hermeneutics as Epistemology," at p 415, in The Blackwell Guide to Epistemology, edited by John Greco and Ernest Sosa, 1999. ISBN: 0-631-20291-9 (pbk.) . I was thinking of a recent comment I recalled of someone quoting Habermas, on the structural transformation of the public sphere when the public discourse is staged to privilege a given group or issue. Now, if this isn't staging discourse, I'd like to know what is. He who pays the most gets the first spot on the returns list. And the bidding stays open, so that if someone new comes along and is willing to pay more the bid for the first spot starts over. I encounter the privilege of invested wealth, when I am searching for information.

Notice how insidious this practice is. I buy the top spot. I now am the top dog. Achieved status, yes? I earned my place by my price; I didn't inherit by right of who I was. Now comes along another dog, bigger than me, and the competition stays fierce. One of the reasons that ascribed status is so important is to provide trust and cooperation. Fierce competition ceases at some point, and one can rely on one's "bought" status, as one would on one's ascribed status. "Respect" for the top dog is not continually rechallenged. But it is here. This ultimately leads to unending and, as Gordon Fellman puts it, obsessive competitiveness, and a society whose single overriding value is profit.

Perhaps you can relate to my horror upon discovering that Google, which I knew only as the more recently favored search engine among my colleagues, was the one Yahoo was competing with in this process of buying and selling the privilege of being first on the returns list. Alfie Kohn, where are you when we need you? Alfie Kohn puts his comments in terms of teaching: when we are given rewards for learning, then the rewards come to be valued more, the learning itself less. Corporations that win the top spotin search engines by paying for it are gaining knowledge prestige amongst unsophisticated viewers by displaying their reward of top dog spot, and in that process they are turning respect for efficient and disinterested knowledge into respect for the company that pays the most for the privilege of top dog. My fear is that this corrupts our respect for trustworthy business dealings, and the honest information that should accompany them. And when it comes to information access, then I am really concerned.

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Discussion Questions

1. In what ways does the search engine relate to the possession of a forum?

   Consider that there is lots of information on the Internet, and very few reliable sources of searching for it. You may find a site that relates to the issue you are seeking information on, but how do you know that the information is accurate, that it doesn't have an underlying perspective at which you would be appalled, essentially, that you can trust it?