Archiving, ordering, and searching: search engines, algorithms, databases, and deep mediatization

Abstract

This article argues that search engines, algorithms, and databases can be considered as a way of understanding deep mediatization. They are embedded in a variety of social and cultural practices, and as such, they change our communicative actions to be shaped by their logic of archiving, ordering, and searching. I argue that, increasingly and in particular ways, search engines, algorithms, and databases shape our everyday communicative actions as they make us think, internalize, and act along the lines of their particular modes of communication action. After having briefly reviewed recent trends in mediatization research, the argument is discussed and unfolded in between the material and social constructivist-phenomenological interpretations of mediatization. In conclusion, it is discussed how deep this form of mediatization can be taken to be.