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Knowing Economics with Your Phone
Book chapter

Knowing Economics with Your Phone

Vicki Macknight
Making Economics Public: The Hows and Whys of Communicating Markets and Models, pp.79-88
Taylor & Francis, 1st ed.
22/05/2023
Handle:
https://hdl.handle.net/10523/50141

Abstract

Economics, Finance and Accounting Mass Communication Technical Communication technology information instrastructure Economics public access
This is a chapter about the impact of new technologies and information infrastructures on public access to and understanding of economics. How can we know economics well when so often our sources of information are algorithmically designed for a company's economic well-being? The chapter opens with a story to help readers reflect on how so many people come to know: via Google, its search engine offering such a high level of speed and reliability that we let it shape our everyday routines of knowing. It is hard though, as the chapter next explores, to generalise in any meaningful way about what other people know from a platform that presents different things to different searchers, depending on the hardware used and the searcher's search history. The solution here is to use the author's own search results as a sensitising study. This reveals different results on different hardware, in particular differences in the definition of economics, the privileging of video content and the ways economics is sold to prospective university students.

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