On 17 October Olof Sundin presented at Digital history research seminar at Stockholm University. His talk was based on his work on the history of information search, juxtaposing contemporary products such as Google and OpenAI’s ChatGPT with the media historical context provided by Umberto Eco’s famous novel “The Name of the Rose.”
He raises the question: What do monasteries and Silicon Valley’s tech giants have in common? For this purpose he investigates the material properties that constitute the information infrastructure for searching and acquiring knowledge, ranging from libraries, bookshelves, and card catalogs to online information systems and today’s tech corporations. Sundin emphasizes how access to information and the mechanisms for controlling it are shaped by society’s dominant knowledge infrastructure and our collective imaginings of this infrastructure and its future. In this context, the increasing politicization of knowledge infrastructures and the dominance of certain sociotechnical imaginaries indicate developments that could potentially have profound implications for our understanding of the value and control of knowledge, as well as its role in the public sphere.
