Conclusion and further research

Th e empirical analysis above have presented a longitudi-nal comparison of web-visions created by two infl uential web-fi lters that sort information according to quite dif-ferent logics of relevance. Th e analysis of these visions serves as an empirical example of the way the web is better understood as a conglomerate of fi lters that make visions available to its users rather than as a unifi ed sphere that can be representatively uncovered. Th e comparison between the visions produced by google.co.uk and wikipedia.com revealed diff erences in the temporality of the visions. Th e Google-visions proved to be altered signifi cantly over time whereas the Wikipedia-visions remained stable. Th e analysis showed that the fl uidity in the Google-visions was correlated with rising discussions about a report re-leased by Th e Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues in the USA and that e.g. the visibility of artists posing social questions about the technology were declining. Th e discussion following the analysis pro-vided three arguments for the usefulness of “web-vision”

analysis that hinted at the potential of using them to say something more general about the world by constructing the visions on the basis of a case-study logic rather than on the logic of sampling spheres, their potential to help analysis of geographically and temporally situated devel-opments of the web as a public arena and their potential to provide insights in to the assemblages and dynamics behind the simplifi ed outcomes of the fi lters.

Th e results represent the beginning of a longitudinal study and further research in the area needs to see the quantitative studies in this paper being supplemented with qualitative studies of the themes and connections between the actors in order to generate a deeper under-standing of the diff erences between the demarcations that diff erent fi lters give rise to. Th ey also need to be supplemented with searches for other issues in order to see

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Noter

1 A way of softening the divide between the offl ine and the online as well as putting less emphasis on a priori selected actors has been to distinguish between spheres within the confi nes of the Internet, such as the blogosphere and the news-sphere and let “ordering de-vises” such as BlogPulse and Google News draw the boundaries around these spheres (Rogers 2009). Th is is a way of letting the

“logics of the web” draw the boundaries instead of snow-balling from a priori known actors. It grounds the representation in online dynamics, but it retains the ambition of uncovering a sphere.

2 Th e keyword searched for ended up being “synthetic biology” be-cause searches on Google Trends, Blog-Pulse and the history of Wikipedia proved that there is much more web-activity around this key-word than around similar words such as “synthetic life”,

“constructive biology” or the abbreviation “synbio”.

if some of the fi ndings above have a more general nature and with words that are related to synthetic biology in order to test the power of the search-word used. Would searches for synthetic life e.g. provide radically diff erent visions? Finally it would strengthen our understanding of the web as a public arena if we were to conduct similar studies on search engines specifi cally oriented towards blogs. Th is would also require analyses of why people are leaving digital traces in diff erent media-spaces and thereby give the user a larger role in the analysis. Besides these shortcomings the paper has hopefully given a sense of the kind of insights that a web-vision analysis can provide as to how the web is active in creating “visions”

of controversies.

3 In order to test whether personalization of search has eff ects that are so huge that the research design of the paper could be called into question, I sat up an experiment in which people from diff er-ent countries conducted the same search for “synthetic biology” on their respective computers. Th e result of the study indicated that personalization may change a few rankings, but since it is mostly

in the lower end of the top 20 it did not seem to have a signifi cant enough impact to challenge the research design presented here.

4 www.issuecrawler.net

5 If the links to Creative Commons, on the other hand, had to do with the issue of e.g “open source biology” they were kept in the visualization.