In an earlier post I wrote about the importance of understanding the legibility, agency and negotiability of archaeological data as we increasingly depend on online data delivery as the basis for the archaeologies we write and especially as those archaeologies show signs of being partly written by the delivery systems themselves.
A simple illustration of this is the idea of filter bubbles. This term was coined in 2011 by Eli Pariser to describe the way in which search algorithms selectively return results depending on their knowledge of the person who asked the question. It’s an idea previously flagged by, amongst others, Jaron Lanier who wrote about ‘agents of alienation’ in 1995, but it came to the fore through the recognition of the personalisation of Google results and Facebook feeds (and is the counter-selling point of the alternative search engine, DuckDuckGo, for example). So can we see this happening with archaeological data? Perhaps not to the extent described by Pariser, Lanier and others, but still …
