Fast Facts: Platforms From Personalization to Centralization

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a noticeable shift in the economies of search and information retrieval concerning how the products of giant platform companies consolidate and represent facts directly in their search results. Concomitantly, media, communication, and information scholars have recently refocused on how media technology companies variably create, collect, connect, and commercialize data related to facts about the world and how such processes have implications for how we know the world. Such approaches often counter popular narratives that seek to frame the problems of platforms in terms of personalization and personalized content. While research on the personalization afforded by media is widespread, platforms also engage in the centralization of facts by merging web data representing factual claims and offering answers directly in search engines and virtual assistants’ results and responses (what we refer to as “fast facts”). These processes considerably affect how knowledge is constructed and shared in a networked society. This special issue collects empirical investigative research on the platformization, exploitation, and centralization of facts while offering a variety of perspectives from which to study these developments, including semantic and infrastructural techniques. This article provides an overview of this field and contextualizes recent media studies on search and information retrieval in broader debates around facts and truth claims.