This post is the fourth of a five part series on ‘using the web for documentaries‘, addressing the following points: the embeddedness of society in the internet, the political in the web, the politics of engines, the politics of tools, and the web as an anticipatory medium.

The previous examples clearly showed the built-in politics of engines: there are specific rankings, specific media on which the engines work and different kinds of source sets, amongst other things.

Apart from engines with built-in politics we are not always aware of, tools can also be devised for a specific kind of politics.

The research tool par excellence, devised for a specific kind of politics, is Wikiscanner. It is designed for scandal research and so enables you to answer specific kinds of questions. Wikiscanner is built on top of Wikipedia and uses a database linking IP addresses to companies. Wikipedia identifies the edits of non logged in users by the computer’s IP address used for the edit. By designing a tool linking the edits of Wikipedia to the editing company, Wikiscanner attracted a lot of press attention when users started looking for specific companies and their edits. The CIA, Scientology, Exxon Mobil, the BBC, and Diebold were all found to favorably edit entries concerning their own company. In Holland the mainstream press started writing about Wikiscanner when it turned out that the Royal Palace had edited the Mabel Wisse Smit entry. Mabel’s page on the English Wikipedia reported about the trial against her. In this particular paragraph, members of the Royal House had changed the accusations from ‘false and incomplete information’ into simply ‘incomplete information’. It is an offence to lie in court, and understandibly the Royals did not want this to be common knowledge – accessible on Wikipedia. Have a look at the edit at http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/f.php?pagetitle=Princess_Mabel_of_Orange-Nassau, then clicking ‘Koninklijk Paleis Huis Ten Bosch’.

So tools have politics too. Society and internet are closely intertwined; massive amounts of data are put online each day, so Internet is often quite up-to-date. This brings us to the final part: the web as an anticipatory medium.