This article investigates growing tensions between global AI ethics and local practices contributing to long-standing debates in media and communication studies on the complex relation between the human and the machine, as well as ‘the global’ and its ties to real-world contexts. We argue that seemingly universal principles such as privacy, accountability and transparency need to be scrutinised by considering the role cultural and social diversity around the globe play in the context of AI. Drawing on examples of a global qualitative study on digital ethics, we introduce the notion of ‘situated ethics’ by focussing on local contexts, concerns and lived experiences. We elaborate how supposedly universal principles are filled with varying, context-specific meanings, and argue that these situated, local perspectives deeply matter when considering how ethical AI principles can be translated into concrete AI design and policy. Strengthening more inclusive processes of AI policy-making under the consideration of situated approaches allows for a more nuanced, and more contextually relevant ethics-in-practice. To conclude, we argue that co-design and community-driven processes could help to avoid top-down approaches to digital ethics, while staying committed to universal human rights to fight power abuse and discrimination in the name of cultural values.

This article investigates how developers of alternative search engines challenge increasingly corporate imaginaries of digital futures by building out counter-imaginaries of search engines devoted to social values instead of mere profit maximization. Drawing on three in-depth case studies of European search engines, it analyzes how search engine developers counter-imagine hegemonic search, what social values support their imaginaries, and how they are intertwined with their sociotechnical practices. This analysis shows that notions like privacy, independence, and openness appear to be fluid, context-dependent, and changing over time, leading to a certain “value pragmatics” that allows the projects to scale beyond their own communities of practice. It further shows how European values, and broader notions of Europe as “unified or pluralistic,” are constructed and co-produced with developers’ attempts to counter-imagine and counteract hegemonic search. To conclude, I suggest three points of intervention that may help alternative search engine projects, and digital technologies more generally, to not only make their counter-imaginaries more powerful, but also acquire the necessary resources to build their technologies and infrastructures accordingly. I finally discuss how “European values,” in all their richness and diversity, can contribute to this undertaking.

A plethora of health apps and tracking devices is used around the globe to measure, store, and process body data. In this article, we use various approaches from the fields of science and technology studies (STS), surveillance studies and medical sociology to grasp and theorize these global trends of body datafication in health-related contexts. We (re)introduce the post-digital concept of the data body as the intersection of online and offline, individual and collective, private and public aspects, emphasizing the entanglements of the physical body from its data- dimensions and its situatedness between empowerment and social control. We conclude by discussing aspects of ownership, care, and control of digital data bodies and how both individuals and society may cope with them in the future.

This article conceptualizes “algorithmic ideology” as a valuable tool to understand and critique corporate search engines in the context of wider socio-political developments. Drawing on critical theory it shows how capitalist value-systems manifest in search technology, how they spread through algorithmic logics and how they are stabilized in society. Following philosophers like Althusser, Marx and Gramsci it elaborates how content providers and users contribute to Google’s capital accumulation cycle and exploitation schemes that come along with it. In line with contemporary mass media and neoliberal politics they appear to be fostering capitalism and its “commodity fetishism” (Marx). It further reveals that the capitalist hegemony has to be constantly negotiated and renewed. This dynamic notion of ideology opens up the view for moments of struggle and counter-actions. “Organic intellectuals” (Gramsci) can play a central role in challenging powerful actors like Google and their algorithmic ideology. To pave the way towards more democratic information technology, however, requires more than single organic intellectuals. Additional obstacles need to be conquered, as I finally discuss.

What are the conditions for the public understanding of biofuels and how do the media shape these conditions under the influence of a new production of knowledge? This article investigates how the biofuel controversy plays out in the Swedish press and Google search engine results and analyses winners and losers in the tight attention economy of contemporary media. It describes different visibility strategies biofuel stakeholders employ in both media arenas, and identifies a form of technoscientific promotion that hybrid actors use to succeed in the day-to- day struggle for media attention. To conclude, it raises broader societal questions of the contemporary blurring of knowledge boundaries and the emergence of new information hierarchies and their biases. By understanding how contemporary media shape controversies, we can address the democratic potential of both mass media and science.

This article investigates how the new spirit of capitalism gets inscribed in the fabric of search algorithms by way of social practices. Drawing on the tradition of the social construction of technology (SCOT) and 17 qualitative expert interviews it discusses how search engines and their revenue models are negotiated and stabilized in a network of actors and interests, website providers and users first and foremost. It further shows how corporate search engines and their capitalist ideology are solidified in a socio-political context characterized by a techno-euphoric climate of innovation and a politics of privatization. This analysis provides a valuable contribution to contemporary search engine critique mainly focusing on search engines’ business models and societal implications. It shows that a shift of perspective is needed from impacts search engines have on society towards social practices and power relations involved in the construction of search engines to renegotiate search engines and their algorithmic ideology in the future.

While the internet is often discussed as empowering or endangering patients due to broadening access to medical and health-related information, little is known about the way patients actually get informed about medical conditions and how the technology shapes their practices. This article draws on 40 user observations and 40 qualitative interviews to explore how users employ the web to obtain knowledge about a chronic disease in the Austrian context. Following concepts from the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) it elaborates how users’ individual medical preferences and search engines’ mechanisms of pre-filtering information co-shape online health information practices. This analysis exemplifies that search engines are no passive intermediaries, but rather actively shape how users browse through, select and evaluate health information in the context of their own bodies of knowledge. Accordingly, new skills are required on the part of users, but also on the part of medical professionals and policy makers. Both policy makers and doctors are invited to engage with users’ highly individual search practices and establish more dialogue-oriented and technology-focused health policy measures, rather than trying to educate users with standardized quality criteria for websites not responding to users’ online routines and needs, as will be finally concluded.

This paper challenges the democratic ideal of the Web as a new public sphere in the medical context. Drawing on a mix of methods it investigates how different Web site providers configure and position their diabetes sites in the multitude of online health information, search engine results in particular. Building on insights gained from critical new media studies and medical sociology, it shows that a range of power relations and information politics are involved in these practices, triggering information visibility hierarchies and a commercialisation of online health information, partly overlapping with off–line contexts. To conclude, it argues for reconsidering the democratic ideal of the Web and focusing on market dynamics involved in the production of medical Web information co–produced by Web site providers and search engine algorithms.

While most of the existing research about online health information focuses exclusively on either the provider or the user side of communication circuits, this article aims to integrate and discuss both sides and their mediated relation to one another. Drawing on actor-network theory, it conceptualizes the provision and use of online health information as sociotechnical. It questions concretely how website providers position their websites and information, how users browse through the web and assemble information, and interrogates the various concepts of online health information these different practices imply. Further, it asks how search engines, and Google in particular, come to play such a dominant role in the way health-related web information is provided and used. The article concludes by evaluating the implications of the findings in regard to debates about the quality of online health information and the way in which web information is distributed and acquired on a broader scale.

This paper investigates how public discourses, as articulated in EU policy and Austrian media documents, take part in the creation and stabilisation of a new patient figure – the e-patient. The documents we analysed act as one material form for enacting, performing and giving meaning to the changes occurring when a new technology enters established networks in the medical realm. Our analysis will show that the public discourses we studied deploy three rather different forms of discursive registers, each of which address and perform a specific relation between currently new information and communication technologies and citizen-patients. From one place, moment or problem-solution package to the next a slightly different hybrid and ‘multiple citizen-patient’ is being shaped, discussed, observed or concealed. The multiplicity we observed reveals crucial tensions and contradicting expectations expressed towards the future citizen-patient, showing the challenges for e-health in the making.

This special issue focuses on Google as an object of critical study and European interventions that increasingly strive to counteract its dominance. Grounded in empirical case studies, it traces the politics of search engines to its very beginning by revisiting Brin’s and Page’s “mixed motives” of the PageRank algorithm and how they contributed to surveillance capitalism. It analyses search engine bias and discrimination by focusing on “data voids” and how they may potentially be filled with extreme right-wing sources, as well as the patching of “offensive results”, both past and present. It poses the question of how Google’s ubiquity is complicit in the creation of ignorance in the context of the climate crisis. Beyond the critique, it finally investigates how providers of alternative search engines counter-imagine hegemonic search and what interventions may help these projects to grow out of their niches, especially in Europe where social values and fundamental rights are strongly upheld in policy rhetoric. The special issue closes with two commentaries embedding “the State of Google Critique and Intervention” in larger discussions on the ethical dimensions of Google Autocomplete and the political economy of technical systems.