دانلود رایگان مقاله نوشتن تگ، موتورهای جستجو، و اسکریپت فرهنگی

Abstract

In this article, I explore the social, political, and ethical implications of search engine use and tag writing. Unlike scholars in economics, law, information science, and media studies who have weighed on these issues for more than a decade now, I argue that scholarship in rhetoric and composition has taken a narrow approach by connecting search engines and tag writing primarily with the teaching of research skills. Relying on a folksonomic approach, I conduct a case study of a Romanian online campaign that aimed to work with and against Google in order to change Romanians’ online identity. Based on this example, I show how search engines can be used, on the one hand, to write new identity scripts and to change cultural patterns, and, on the other hand, to reinscribe power relations and limited identity politics. I also argue that the campaign is an example of public rhetorical education that calls on us, teachers and scholars of composition, to rethink our pedagogies and to expand our teaching tools. Ultimately, integrating search engines and tag writing into the classroom can teach students to use technologies more responsibly and to reflect critically on their everyday writing practices, which, in their simplest manifestations, are powerful forms of culture-writing.

5. Conclusion

Some teachers may doubt that the goals of first-year composition should include knowledge about search engines. They could argue that this type of classroom material would better fit in advanced composition courses where digital writing is the main focus. Others may say that one more student site or tagged image will not change the rest of the Internet world. The possibility of becoming the next big hit online is very low, and the level of sustained effort required for making substantial changes based on searches is not a rhetorical affordance that individual composers can count on. However, I want to point out that tagging and search writing are already routine practices; these are acts that we all engage in daily, whether we reflect on them or not. In fact, some users have already designed methods to work more actively with and against the automatic suggestions offered by search engines. In “The Google Dilemma,” James Grimmelmann (2008/09) presents the phenomenon of Googlebombing, which he defines as the process of flooding a search engine with tags in order to re-arrange its suggestions. Among many examples of Googleboming, Grimmelmann mentions the case of George W. Bush’s webpage in 2003, when Democrat users consistently inserted in Google the phrase “miserable failure” in association with Bush’s official biography. This intensive online tagging led to the automatic retrieval of the phrase “miserable failure” whenever someone searched for Bush’s biographical information.