Oppression is changing your internet searches. I have noticed that online searches on many different topics are already yielding vastly different results than they were even a month or two ago.
In my De-Google Your Life series of posts, I outline why no one should be using Google Search as your search engine. But even with more private search engines, your searches will show more white cis het ableist capitalist colonial results overwhelmingly overrepresented because history and documentation websites are being edited and deleted in real time. It is palpable and flagrant.
What does this mean for you? What does it mean for us?
We will have less information available to us through internet searches, period. This is not only in the form of sites not being found and going down, but also searches yielding fewer, accurate, relevant, and desired results.
It will become increasingly difficult to find on-the ground-images, first-person testimonies, and accounts of historical events from the perspectives of People of the Global Majority, disabled people, trans and queer people, or non-English and translated sources for starters.
Unfortunately, it will also become even more challenging to find straightforward recommendations to legal, health care, governmental, and technical procedures. Accessibility guides, information, and resources will become less available. You will have to dig even deeper and further for accurate health and sickness assistance. For scientific studies and research for any text, fiction and non-fiction, the excavation work to get to the information will become part of the work itself.
I talk about this often, we must support the wisdom protectors, the librarians, educators, archivists, teachers, documentarians, caretakers, creatives, artists, elders, writers, history recorders, and keepers, written and oral. Support efforts like the Internet Archive and Invisible Histories Project. Join and support your local library, create your own community libraries, document everything you can, share skills and knowledge, and make sure you cover on and offline.
Your internet searches moving forward will not look like your internet searches in the past. That does not necessarily have to be a negative thing, and in fact can be the opportunity for us to make information more accessible and robust.
We have to thank, use, and strategize around information differently. Protect the wisdom protectors.
And better yet, become a wisdom protector, too.
Comments are closed.