Indexing it all: the subject in the age of documentation, information, and data PDF
Preview Indexing it all: the subject in the age of documentation, information, and data
Indexing It All History and Foundations of Information Science Edited by Michael Buckland, Jonathan Furner, and Markus Krajewski Human Information Retrieval by Julian Warner Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia by Joseph Michael Reagle Jr. Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548–1929 by Markus Krajewski, translated by Peter Krapp Information and Intrigue: From Index Cards to Dewey Decimals to Alger Hiss by Colin B. Burke Indexing It All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data by Ronald E. Day Indexing It All The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data Ronald E. Day The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2014 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. For information, please email [email protected]. This book was set in Stone by the MIT Press. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available. ISBN: 978-0-262-02821-9 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Dedication: Once again, in admiration and friendship Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii 1 Introduction 1 2 Paul Otlet: Friends and Books for Information Needs 15 3 Representing Documents and Persons in Information Systems: Library and Information Science and Citation Indexing and Analysis 35 4 Social Computing and the Indexing of the Whole 59 5 The Document as the Subject: Androids 89 6 Governing Expression: Social Big Data and Neoliberalism 123 7 Conclusion: The Modern Documentary Tradition and the Site and Time of Critique 145 Notes 155 References 161 Index 169 Preface Indexing It All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data, gives a critical epistemic-historical account of the development of the modern documentary tradition and its mode of governmentality in the twentieth century and now the twenty-first. In these pages I argue that documentary indexing and indexicality play a major and increasing role in organizing personal and social identity and value and in reorganizing social and political life. This phenomenon has resulted in a rewriting of personal and social psychologies of the Western tradition of the past two hundred years, and it is altering notions of self and personhood, texts and textuality, and personal judgment and the role of critique in thought and politics. Today those foundations of Enlightenment thought, such as indi- vidual natural powers, freedom from surveillance, and the rights of speech, are routinely overrun and erased with the important aid of documentary systems in the service of state and corporate power and profit, in both dem- ocratic and nondemocratic states. Routinely and obsessively we use online resources—whose algorithms and indexes both serve and profit from us in ways that the users are largely unaware—as the way of overcoming the physical and emotional distances that are a consequence of modernity, and in particular capitalist modernity, where markets have become the means and the ends for reasoning, communication, and increasingly, emotion. These devices have become the governance structures—the “idea” or “con- cept”—for our human manner of being (subsuming other beings in this, as well), which increasingly subsume and subvert the former roles of personal judgment and critique in personal and social being and politics. In writing Indexing It All as a critical epistemic-historical account of these events in twentieth- and twenty-first-century modernity, I intend to show the historical continuity of documentary techniques and technologies,
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