Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Retrospect and Prospect
We can distinguish a retrospect and a prospect regarding full-text retrieval.
The retrospect comprises the theoretical development to this point—the
labor theoretic approach and the further sources adduced in this chapter.
In contrast, the prospect involves developing a fuller understanding of the
emerging qualitative changes isolated by the retrospect, not just account-
ing for their existence. It will be constituted by the subsequent chapters.
Retrospect
The labor theoretic approach can explain the existence of full-text
retrieval as a real-world practice. Its emergence can be understood as a
product of the desire to exploit the enhanced selection power made pos-
sible by the quantitatively increased storage and processing capacities of
modern, humanly constructed information technologies. Selection power
continues to be implicitly and strongly valued, and it remains produced
by selection labor, with aspects of that labor (particularly description
labor) transferred to machine processes. Therefore, the value implicitly
attached to selection power and its production by selection labor reveals
consistency with the labor theoretic approach. The significance of selec-
tion power (and the value attached to it) and the inescapability of selec-
tion labor are further confirmed by systems that offer enhanced selection
power but require forms of selection labor—systems currently entering
widespread existence and use.
The underlying dynamism for change can be identified precisely. Change
has emerged principally from the reduced costs of syntactic machine
processes and the increased amount of resources that can be incorpo-
rated economically into those processes. The labor theoretic approach
and the theories in which it is embedded can explain how substitution of
machine processes for direct human labor reduces the costs of processes.
The enhancement of human capacities that emerges from repeated sub-
stitutions is also explicable, if less frequently recognized, particularly by
the labor theory of value. Therefore, the immediate origins for change are
consistent with a broader emphasis on the significance of changes in the
material basis of being or existence to practice, and with a more specific
view of recent developments in information technologies as a revolution
in the mechanization of mental labor.
