| START Conference Manager |
ASIST 2012 Annual Meeting
Baltimore, MD, October 26-30, 2012
Information as Exclusion: Towards a Critical Understanding of Everyday Life
Harrison Smith
Monday, 8:00am
This paper theoretically explores the production of everyday life through
infrastructures of geo-demographic surveillance and software in order to reveal how information seeking is becoming increasingly mediated through preferential
databases, which sort individuals and groups into particular consumer tastes, preferences, and lifestyles. This is particularly important as the paradigm of
everyday life information seeking has tended to neglect the social and material
production and mediation of everyday life, particularly within the context of neoliberal service sector economies and cities. It is argued that within this
context, the layering of code and software onto everyday life is being structured by political and economic market relations which sustain
institutions of social exclusion. Information as exclusion therefore considers how everyday life information seeking, sharing, and access is increasingly
defined by software which mediates the flow of information, in order to maximize neoliberal market practices.