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5 Conclusion: from research findings to future research 5.1 Is the cure better than the disease? According to Langdon Winner (1980), there is a certain discourse that justifies certain actions, often based on assumptions about how certain processes should be run: Whatever claims one may wish to make on behalf of liberty, justice, or equality can be immediately neutralized when confronted with arguments to the effect: ‘Fine, but that’s no way to run a railroad’ (or steel mill, or airline, or communications system, and so on). In many instances, to say that some technologies are inherently political is to say that certain widely accepted reasons of practical necessity—especially the need to maintain crucial technological systems as smoothly working entities—have tended to eclipse other sorts of moral and political reasoning. (Winner 1980, 133). Winner’s example is reminiscent of discussions on transparency of algorithms when he refers to claims of necessary actions or policies. At this moment, we are at the point that powerful companies seem to claim: “Fine, we understand that you want to have transparency on the algorithm, but that is no way to run an ICT company”. It is understandable that any company wants to control how they do their work, yet, we should be aware of too easily accepting these claims. Is there really a “need to maintain” algorithmic opacity and “what other sorts of moral and political reasoning”—to use Winner’s words—are eclipsed if we (blindly) accept these claims? Keeping algorithms opaque may lead to many unintended and unwanted issues, such as bias and discrimination. While algorithmic transparency, or rather the lack thereof, is more and more often addressed both in academics and popular media, we must not forget to scrutinize common starting points of these discussions and underlying beliefs. My study was initiated by questioning such a seeming common belief—the general idea that algorithms should (partly) be kept private to prevent spammers and hackers to abuse the disclosed information. While my study has not found whether this claim is indeed true—which was not the purpose of this thesis—it did find that in the Google corpus various discursive strategies are used to render Google and her products in a certain way. These discursive renderings of the algorithm, its owner (Google), and its users may influence power relations between the latter two. To summarize, it was found that Google represents itself and its products including search as caring, while spammers are rendered as enemies by the use of words that are associated with war or conflict. Linguistic choices such as these may have justifying effects on Google’s actions and make their policies more agreeable: we want to ‘freely’ use Google’s products and we do not want hackers to spam our search results, so of course we agree with Google’s policies that will ensure that Google’s products are kept free—both free in the financial sense and free from spam and other ‘bad things’. Yet, the idea that users want products to be free may be an idea that is constructed and not something that users really want, especially if it will be disclosed what the costs are of using free products—no attention 51PDF Image | peek into the discursive construction of the Google Search Algorithm: A critical discourse analysis
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