Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
theory. Experimental information retrieval, which developed partly from
library and information cultures, has had a marginally direct effect on
practice and correspondingly limited secondary real-world effects flowing
from the primary dynamism. The changes resulting from the mediation of
the dynamics for change within the library and information cultures—the
distribution of products of description labor and the invoking of machine
processes for ordering results—are historically embedded and can be
regarded as a quantitative expansion of existing practices.
For Internet search engines, change has occurred principally but not
exclusively within the intersection between machine syntactic processes
and description. Quantitative expansion in the potential scope of syntactic
description progress has created some qualitatively significant but poorly
understood changes in human semantic search labor. A consequential
and highly significant dynamism flows toward the intersection of human
semantic labor and searching, increasing the possibilities for exploiting
resources (the change occurs in the lower left quarter of table 5.2, and
consequential effects appear in the upper right quarter). From the sys-
temic perspective developed in studies of the role of information services,
changes in one aspect of a system that have unintended consequences in
another aspect would be understood as a familiar phenomenon (Roberts
1997). Semantic description labor and the more formalized invoking of
machine processes for search ordering and combination developed in and
associated with the cultural milieu of library and information science are
usually bypassed, but not always. The potential for exploitation of full-
text description is much less embedded historically and less fully under-
stood than developments in library and information science. It represents
a qualitative change, not just quantitative expansion.
The persistence of underlying cultures and their influence on practice
illustrates that practice and particularly theoretical consciousness can
be underdetermined by the material basis of being: “[t]he tradition of
the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the liv-
ing” (Marx 1852/1973, 146). The material basis of being, mediated by
technology, directly affects practice in the sense of methods for construct-
ing working systems and practical understanding of how to exploit those
systems. In contrast, theory can be slow to change and dominated by its
inheritance from previous modes of thought. Thus, practice can precede
theory.
