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2 Methodology and methods Critical discourse analysis is productive to research contexts in which language is used by powerful agents to construct or hide certain ideas or topics. My thesis aims to understand exactly this phenomenon: how the Google Search algorithm is discursively constructed and the implications of this discursive construction for the conservation of power relations between Google and its users. Therefore, CDA was chosen as a methodology. CDA is both a theory and a methodology (Wodak 2001, 121). For reasons of structure this chapter has been divided into two sections. The first covers CDA’s theoretical underpinnings: it’s history, most important concepts, the pros and cons to CDA, and the specific approach that was used in this study. The second section covers the actual methods that were used for data collection and analysis. 2.1 Theoretical underpinnings How we perceive the world depends partly on the glasses we look through: post- structuralists hold that language constructs how the world is seen and understood (Lister et al. 2009, 68). Consider, for instance, water: “’Water’ is not the same theoretical object in chemistry as it is in hydraulics”, yet the substance is the same (Viktor Burgin’s example in Lister et al. 2009, 68). Similarly, ‘freedom fighter’ and ‘terrorist’ may denote the same person, while this person is perceived differently, based on the word that is used to represent him or her. Discourses are “elaborate systems of language” (Lister et al. 2009, 68). The term ‘discourse’ has been developed by Michel Foucault (Wurth and Rigney 2009, 93). He defines discourse as “practices which systematically form the objects of which they speak” (Foucault 1972, 54). Discourses, thus, also “shape the way we think about new media” (Lister et al. 2009, 77), such as algorithms. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a theory and a method to study (such) discourses. CDA, or rather Critical Linguistics (CL), as it became to be known, emerged in the 1970s. It “regards language as a social practice” (Wodak 2001, 1) and it recognized that language played a role in “structuring power relations in society” (Wodak 2001, 5). CL/CDA is consequently particularly interested in “the relation between language and power”, especially when there are relationships of inequality, dominance, power and control manifested in language (Wodak 2001, 2). In first instance, CL’s focus was mainly on the formal aspects of language; the attention to power and social hierarchy was limited (Wodak 2001, 5). By the 1990s a distinct approach to CL had developed, first by Norman Fairclough (Baker and Ellece 2011, 26), what came to be known as CDA, which was radically different from traditional linguistics (Wodak 2001, 5). This paradigm sees, for instance, language as a social phenomenon and “not only individuals, but also institutions and social groupings have specific meanings and values, that [sic] are expressed in language in systematic ways” (Wodak 2001, 6). 25PDF Image | peek into the discursive construction of the Google Search Algorithm: A critical discourse analysis
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