ABSTRACT
Elvestad and Phillips interrogate a once popular assumption that the Internet should (or does) reflect “the wisdom of crowds”; that if the structures of design are “neutral” then what emerges there is a reflection of the public will. But, as they go on to demonstrate in this excerpt from a much larger piece, Google and Facebook, for two prominent examples, are not neutral platforms but are instead data-mining corporations the popularity of which has severely undermined old models of—among many other things—news gathering and dissemination. The chapter considers the emergence of the ideas of the Internet as a “free” and perhaps even libertarian space but goes on to show how Internet behemoths Facebook and Google actually work and how their massive use of “big data” culled from their users ultimately dictate the content of users’ feeds/results, ultimately undermining any claims for the “wisdom of crowds” on the Internet.
