Digital Media and Society

/ glossary /

A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z

Words highlighted within entries refer to terms found elsewhere in the glossary.

A

Algorithm

An algorithm is any methodical way of doing things, and, in the case of search engines, usually refers to the process by which a given engine processes the data from their crawlers and determines the relevance of pages to a particular query.

Anchor text

The text that is highlighted as part of a hyperlink on a page.

Archie

A search engine for FTP sites.

Assembly Line

An assembly line is a manufacturing process in which interchangeable parts are added to a product in a sequential manner, using optimally planned logistics to create a finished product much faster than with handcrafting type methods. The best-known form of the assembly line, the moving assembly line, was realized in practice by Ford Motor Company between 1908 and 1913, and made famous in the following decade by the social ramifications of mass production, such as the affordability of the Ford Model T.

B

Backlink

A term used to describe a hyperlink leading to a page, rather than leading away from it.

Behavioral targeting

This term refers to the ability to target particular advertising messages according to "behaviors" of a user, including visiting or viewing some combination of pages, searching for particular keywords, and the like.

Berrypicking

The process of assembling the answer to a query from a diverse set of documents. Coined by Marcia Bates in 1989.

Blog

A blog (a portmanteau of web log) is a website where entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. 'Blog' can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function asmore personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images and links to other blogs, web pages and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (artlog), photographs
(photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), music (MP3 blog) or audio (podcasting), which are part of a wider network of social media.

Boolean operators

Words that indicate how keywords should be used by a search engine – including AND, OR, and NOT – that allow for more control over what is returned.

Broadband

Refers to telecommunication in which a wide band of frequencies is available to transmit information. Because a wide band of frequencies is available, information can be multiplexed and sent on many different frequencies or channels within the band concurrently, allowing more information to be transmitted in a given amount of time.

Browser

A web browser is a software application that enables a user to display and interact with text, images, videos, music and other information typically located on a web page at a website on the World
Wide Web. Text and images on a web page can contain hyperlinks to other web pages at the same or a different website. Web browsers allow a user to quickly and easily access information provided on many web pages at many websites by traversing these links.

C

Civil Society

In the modern sense, civil society connotes those areas of culture, politics, private life, the economy, media and so on that are outside or apart from the power of the state and its bureaucracies.

Clickthroughs

A measurement of how many people click on an advertisement to visit the advertised site.

Cloaking

Providing different version of pages to visitors who are identified as crawlers rather than as humans. This can be used by spamdexers to hide the true content of a page, but may have legitimate uses for those who wish to provide an alternative version of the page for search engines that have trouble with various formats (Flash, video, and the like).

Commodification

In Marxist political economy, commodification takes place when economic value is assigned to something not previously considered in economic terms; for example, an idea, identity or gender. So commodification refers to the expansion of market trade to previously non-market areas, and to the treatment of things as if they were a tradeable commodity.

Crawler

A program that automatically follows links from page to page on the World Wide Web, recording the content of each page.

Crowdsourcing

A neologism rooted in the idea of "outsourcing" largescale production to a widely distributed group of (usually) volunteers willing to contribute a small amount of effort toward the project.

Cyberspace

A term coined by science-fiction writer William Gibson to describe his computer-generated virtual reality in which the information wealth of a future corporate society is represented as an abstract space. The word has come to be used as a very generalized term to cover any sense of digitally created 'space', from the Internet to virtual reality.

D

Dark Fibre

Dark fibre is optical fibre infrastructure (cabling and repeaters) that is currently in place but is not being used. It is referred to as 'dark' fibre because optical fibre conveys information in the form of light pulses, so when unused they are dark.

Deep link

A hyperlink to a page on a website that is not the intended entry page. Search engines encourage deep linking, and some site designers and owners discourage it.

Deep web

Sometimes used as an alternative to "Invisible Web," in order to clearly indicate that the pages may be visible, but that they are not indexed by the major search engines.

Dialectical/dialectics

The word 'interaction' is sometimes used as a synonym for dialectic and this captures the dynamic of dialectic – but there is more. The word 'dialectic' is derived from the Greek word for open-ended dialogue or debate. A debate begins with a proposition (thesis), then the examination of a contrary view (antithesis), and then arrives at a new view that incorporates elements of both sides (synthesis). In the Marxist tradition this basic philosophical framework was developed, passing through Hegel's more spiritual meaning, into what was called 'dialectical materialism' (the application of this reasoning to realworld criteria). For Marx, this was in the dialectic of history that was being played out in the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat that would eventually be resolved in the 'synthesis' of communism. In cultural studies, the dialectic has been imbued with a critical element, or the arrival at synthesis through critical reflection, or what Fredric Jameson called 'stereoscopic thinking' – the ability to think through both sides of the argument (1992: 28).

Digital Divide

Stems from critique of the nexus between neoliberalism and the ICT revolution, and argues that freemarket- based distribution of the fruits of information technologies will always leave behind those with the inability to pay. As information technologies spread across much of society, those who cannot afford them are increasingly disadvantaged.

Dot-Com Bubble

The 'dot-com bubble' was a speculative bubble covering roughly 1995–2001 (with a climax in 2000), during which stock markets in Western nations saw their value increase rapidly due to growth in the new Internet sector and related fields. The period was marked by the founding (and, in many cases, spectacular failure) of a group of new Internet-based companies, commonly referred to as dot-coms. A combination of rapidly increasing stock prices, individual speculation in stocks and widely available venture capital created an exuberant environment in which many of these businesses dismissed standard business models, focusing on increasing market share at the expense of the bottom line. The bursting of the dot-com bubble marked the beginning of a relatively mild yet rather lengthy early 2000s recession.

E

F

File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

A protocol that allows for files to be uploaded and downloaded on the internet.

Fordism

A stage in the development of twentieth-century capitalism characterized by mass factory-based production for mass consumption in a mass market. Also characterized in the 'high Fordism' phase 1945–73) as the operation of the 'social contract' between capital, labour and government. In this 'managed economy' phase the 'strategic heights' of the economy such as shipbuilding, steel, heavy engineering and so on were planned and regulated to a high degree.

Frankfurt School

Group of German philosophers and sociologists who moved to the USA to escape Nazi repression in the 1930s. Its leading theorists, such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and, more peripherally, Walter Benjamin, pioneered theories on the nature of cultural production in industrial society.

G

Global civil society

Loose worldwide coalition of diverse groups, including NGOs, social movements, trade unions, political parties, religious groups and so on, that arose to confront neoliberal globalization and effects on their local constituencies.

Globalization

In its economic context it is closely linked to the idea of the New Economy. Globalization is characterized by the opening up of markets and borders to economic competition, and the drastic deregulation of economies more generally, making them susceptible to 'market forces'.

Golden triangle

A triangular area in the upper left-hand side of (for example) a search engine results page that attracts the glance of a person's eye most readily.

Google bowling

Making a competitor look like a search spammer by employing obvious spam techniques on their behalf.

Google dance

The reordering of PageRank that occurred when Google completed a new crawl. Search engines now crawl continuously, so such changes are more gradual.

Googlebomb

An attempt to associate a key phrase with a given website by collectively using that phrase in links to a site. The original example is linking the keyword "miserable failure" to the White House biography of George W. Bush.

Googlejuice

An imaginary representation of the reputational currency provided by linking from one site to another. Such links lead to higher PageRank on Google.

Googlewack

A search of two terms on Google that returns a single page as the only result. Coined by Gary Stock in 2002.

Gopher

A distributed menu-driven protocol for publishing content to the internet, predating the World Wide Web.

H

Hegemonic

Describes the process of domination of subordinate classes and groups through the elaboration and penetration of ideology (ideas and assumptions) into the common sense and everyday practice of those subordinate classes and groups (see Gitlin, 1981: 253).

Historical materialism

Historical materialism is the methodological approach to the study of society, economics and history that was first articulated by Karl Marx (1818–83). Historical materialism looks for the causes of developments and changes in human societies in the way in which humans collectively make the means to live, thus giving an emphasis, through economic analysis, to everything that coexists with the economic base of society (e.g. social classes, political structures, ideologies).

Hits

The number of results returned for a particular query. (Not to be confused with Hypertext Induced Topic Selection, or HITS, which is an algorithm developed by Jon Kleinberg designed to rank the
authority of documents in a network.)

Horizontal search

Search of the broader web, undertaken by general purpose search engines, which are considered "horizontal" in order to differentiate them from search engines focused on "vertical search."

Human–Computer Interaction

Human–computer interaction (HCI), alternatively man–machine interaction (MMI) or computer–human interaction (CHI), is the study of interaction between people (users) and computers. It is often regarded as the intersection of computer science, behavioural sciences, design and several other fields of study. Interaction between users and computers occurs at the user interface (or simply interface), which includes both software and hardware, for example, general purpose computer peripherals and large-scale mechanical systems, such as aircraft and power plants.

HyperText Markup Language (HTML)

A set of textual "tags" that allows authors to indicate the structure of a document in such a way that it may be interpreted and displayed by a web browser.

I

ICTs

Information and Communication Technologies. Literally, any device or application, hardware or software, such as a PC, mobile phone, scanner or personal digital assistant (PDA) that is connectable, in theory or in practice, to the network of networks that comprise the contemporary high-tech information society.

Ideology

An ideology is an organized collection of ideas. Count Antoine Destutt de Tracy coined the word in the late eighteenth century to define a 'science of ideas'. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things as in 'common sense' and several philosophical tendencies, or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to all members of this society. The main purpose behind an ideology is to offer change in society through a normative thought process. Ideologies are systems of abstract thought (as opposed to mere ideation) applied to public matters and thus make this concept central to politics. Implicitly every political tendency entails an ideology whether or not it is propounded as an explicit system of thought.

Information foraging

A theory developed by Pirolli and Card that suggests that humans search for information the way that animals search for food, making repeated, rapid decisions about the cost and potential benefit of following particular links.

Inline link

The HTML code indicating the positioning of an image on a webpage includes the address where the image may be found. This is normally on the same server as the page itself, but such links can pull
the image from anywhere on the web. This sort of lifting of images into a new context is sometimes called "hotlinking."

Invisible web

That proportion of the web that for various reasons is not crawled and indexed by general-purpose search engines. IP (Internet Protocol) address A unique four-digit hexadecimal code indicating a single numerical address for every device connected to the internet.

J

K

Keyword

Word or series of words that make up a search engine query.

Keyword stuffing

Various techniques for hiding many unrelated keywords, and often a large number of the same keyword, on a page so that it is more likely to come up as a false result when people search for those keywords.

L

laissez-faire

A French phrase literally meaning 'let happen', or 'let do'. From the French diction first used by the eighteenth-century physiocrats as an injunction against government interference with trade, it became used as a synonym for strict free-market economics during the early and mid-nineteenth century. It is generally understood to be a doctrine that maintains that private initiative and production are best
allowed to roam free, opposing economic interventionism and taxation by the state beyond that which is perceived to be necessary to maintain individual liberty, peace, security and property rights.

Link farming

The creation of large numbers of webpages with the single intent of linking to a particular page and making it appear popular to search engines that rely on inbound links to determine page relevance.

Link slutting(also "link whoring")

Creating specific content for a site or engaging in other activities with the primary aim of collecting inbound links from other sites, and increasing Googlejuice.

Link spamming

Generally, the use of links to deceive search engines as to the reputation or authority of a target website. This may also include the use of hidden links that are visible to search engines, but not to human users.

Locative media

Content that is sensitive to the geographical location of the user, and responds accordingly.

Luddism

The Luddites were a social movement of British textile artisans in the early nineteenth century who protested – often by destroying mechanized looms – against the changes produced by the Industrial Revolution, which they felt threatened their livelihood.

M

Metasearch engine

A search engine that accepts a query, requests results from several di¤erent search engines, and then provides the combined results.

Metatag

HTML allows for tags that convey information about the page, but are not displayed on the page. These can provide a summary, relevant keywords, information about authorship, and a number of
other things.

MIT Media Lab

Institution founded by Nicholas Negroponte and Jerome Wiesner in 1985. Funded through corporate sponsorship, the Media Lab conducts research that aims to integrate ICTs into many realms of culture, economy and society.

Mode of production

In the writings of Karl Marx and the Marxist theory of historical materialism, a mode of production (in German: Produktionsweise, meaning 'the way of producing') is a specific combination of:
• Productive forces: these include human labour power and the means of production (e.g. tools, equipment, buildings and technologies, materials, and improved land), and desire.
• Social and technical relations of production: these include the property, power and control relations governing society's productive assets, often codified in law, cooperative work relations and
forms of association, relations between people and the objects of their work, and the relations between social classes.

MP3

Motion Picture Export Group Layer 3. Digital format for encoding sound, widely used for sharing music files over the Internet.

N

NASDAQ

National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotation. It is a virtual, computer-driven equities trading system for over 3,600 communications, biotechnology, financial services and media
companies. It began trading in the USA in 1971.

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Any attempt to extract grammatical or semantic data from "natural" human language (as opposed to computer languages).

Neoliberalism

Ideology that argues the innate superiority of the 'free market' as the principal means for organizing economic life. Arose as a re-reading (or misreading) of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776), which argued that the hidden hand of market forces would bring an economy into an 'equilibrium' of supply and demand. Contra Smith, however, neoliberal fundamentalists aim to bring the logic of the market to every realm of society. Neoliberalism underpins both globalization and the New Economy.

Network society

A historical trend whereby the dominant functions of society, that is to say, its economic, cultural and media processes, are increasingly organized around networks. ICT-based networks have become, as Castells puts it, 'the new social morphologies [organizing structures] of our societies' (1996: 469).

O

Ontology

An "ontology," within the field of computer science, refers to an explicit definition of concepts and their relationships within a particular domain. They are essential to the development of a "semantic web."

Organic search results

Links from a search engine that are created as part of the natural process of search, and not, for example, as part of a paid placement, are often said to be "organic."

P

PageRank

The Google algorithm for determining which results are most authoritative, based on the hyperlinked structure of pages linking to them.

Paid inclusion

Payment guarantees a listing in a search engine, though usually not any particular ranking on the results pages.

Pay per click (PPC)

Advertising paid for in terms of clickthroughs, rather than "impression," or single appearance of a message before a viewer: A common method of pricing advertising on search engines.

Permalink

The URL of a blog posting that remains stable so that references to it will continue to be valid.

Podcast

A podcast is a collection of digital media files that is distributed over the Internet, often using syndication feeds, for playback on portable media players and personal computers. The term 'podcast' is a portmanteau of the acronym 'Pod' – standing for 'Portable on Demand' – and 'broadcast'.

Political economy

Originally the term for studying production, buying and selling, and their relations with law, custom and government. Political economy originated in moral philosophy and developed in the eighteenth century as the study of the economies of states. In the late nineteenth century, the term came to be replaced by the term 'economics', and was used by those seeking to place the study of economy
upon mathematical and axiomatic bases, rather than the structural relationships of production and consumption.

Post-Fordism

The term for the mode of production and associated socio-economic system theorized to be found in most industrialized countries today. It can be contrasted with Fordism, the productive method and socioeconomic system typified by Henry Ford's car plants, in which workers work on a production line, performing specialized tasks repetitively. Post-Fordism can be applied in a wider context to describe a whole system of modern social processes. Because post-Fordism describes the world as it is today, various thinkers have different views of its form and implications. As the theory continues to evolve, it is
commonly divided into three schools of thought: Flexible Specialization, Neo-Schumpeterianism and the Regulation School.

Power law distribution

A distribution for which there exists a scale-free inverse relationship between an observed magnitude of an event and its frequency.

Preferential attachment

The idea that new links in a network are likely to lead to the nodes that already enjoy a large number of backlinks.

Q

R

Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID)

A very small wireless beacon that allows objects to be identified from a distance.

Regulation theory

Regulation theory discusses historical change using two central concepts: Regimes of Accumulation (ROA) and Modes of Regulation (MOR). ROAs are particular forms in which capital organizes and expands for a period of time, exhibiting some degree of stability. A key example of an ROA from the work of the Regulation theorists is 'Fordism'. MORs are those constructs of law, customs, forms of state, policy paradigms and other institutional practices which provide the context of the ROA's operation. Generally speaking, MORs support ROAs by providing a conducive and supportive environment. But sometimes there is tension between the two, and this means that something must give. The change to and from Fordism is explained by the School in these terms.

Relevance

The degree to which a search engine's results correspond to a searcher's goal.

Robot Exclusion Protocol

A way for content authors to instruct crawlers which pages should and should not be indexed.

RSS

A file format that packages new additions to a website over time in a format easily parsed by other applications. Abbreviation of "Really Simple Syndication," "RDF Site Summary," or "Rich Site Summary."

S

Scraper site

A website set up to borrow content from elsewhere on the web automatically, and built with the single aim of driving up advertising revenue without producing original content.

Search engine marketing (SEM)

Generally meant to include both SEO and other forms of marketing: ad placement, word-of-mouth advertising, branding, and the like.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

The process (and industry) of creating pages that will receive more visibility on large search engines.

Search engine results page (SERP)

A page listing the ranked results of a particular query to a search engine.

Semantic web

The semantic web is a proposed way of extending the web to make it possible for computers to associate data with other data on the web, to act on that data, and to draw inferences from that data.

Social capital

The term has been around since at least Bourdieu (1983) but brought to prominence by Robert Putnam (2000). It refers to features of social organization such as networks, norms and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit.

Social democracy

Social democracy is a political ideology that emerged in the late nineteenth century out of the socialist movement. Modern social democracy is unlike socialism in the traditional sense which aims to end the predominance of the capitalist system, or in the Marxist sense which aims to replace it entirely; instead, social democrats aim to reform capitalism democratically through state regulation and the creation of state-sponsored programmes and organizations which work to ameliorate or remove injustices inflicted by the capitalist market system. The term itself is also used to refer to the particular kind of society that social democrats advocate. While some consider social democracy a moderate type of socialism, others, defining socialism in the traditional or Marxist sense, reject that designation.

Spamdexing

A term used to describe search spamming, or attempts to rise to the top of the search rankings for a set of keywords.

Spider

See "Crawler".

Splog

Spam blog, a blog set up in order to create links to a target page, in an effort to make it appear more authoritative and receive better placement on search engine results pages.

Stop words

Words that are too common to be useful in a search, and are generally ignored by search engines.

T

Technopolitics

Used here to refer to the politics of the 'global civil society movement', whose organization and communications are based around ICTs.

Transaction Log Analysis (TLA)

Records of many interactions on the internet, including search records, are kept in log files that can later be analyzed to provide information about search behaviors.

U

Uniform Resource Locator (URL)

The unique web address of a given page or site, e.g.: http://www.digitalmediaandsociety.com

Usenet

An internet-based news forum system that reached its peak just before the World Wide Web became popular. It was initially archived on the web by Dejanews, which, when purchased by Google, eventually become Google Groups.

User-generated media

A broad term taking in amateur production of media: especially things like blogs, podcasts, and shared photos and video.

V

Veronica

A search engine that was used with Gopher.

Vertical search

Search engines that limit themselves in terms of topic, medium, region, language, or some other set of constraints, and cover that area in great depth, are often called "vertical" in order to differentiate them from general-purpose search engines.

W

Web analytics

Tools to measure and understand the behavior of users on a given website.

Web robot (or "Bot")

See "Crawler".

Wi-fi

Abbreviation for wireless fidelity.

World Social Forum

The World Social Forum (WSF) is an annual meeting held by members of the anti-globalization (using the term 'globalization' in a doctrinal sense, not a literal one) or 'alter-globalization' movement to coordinate world campaigns, share and refine organizing strategies, and inform each other about movements from around the world and their issues.

X

Y

Z

Zipf Law

Distribution of events such that there is an inverse relationship (with some fixed exponent) between the frequency of an event and its rank. Named for George Kingsley Zipf.