Everything interacts. Always. We shape it. It shapes us. It’s all a big soup.
As a teacher-librarian, I’m constantly making decisions about which databases to subscribe to, which search tools to recommend, which encyclopedias to point students toward. These decisions often get framed as “neutral” by just providing access to information, offering students “the right resources.” But are they?
This question started nagging at me during IP 2 where I analyzed software encyclopedias through McLuhan’s tetrad and Actor-Network Theory. I decided to test something simple: I searched for two controversial topics across different encyclopedia subscriptions our division provides to students. The results weren’t just different—they were fundamentally different.
I sat there staring at two browser windows, and something clicked: this wasn’t a bug. This was a feature. Each platform was enacting a specific epistemology, a particular idea of what knowledge is. And my choice (as a librarian, and as someone who shapes student access to information) wasn’t neutral at all. I was choosing between worlds, while selling the guise of neutrality.
Why start with search?
When it came time to get to brass tacks on this assignment, I knew I needed an entry point that was practical. Not abstract. Not Barad discussing quantum entanglement — even though it’s fascinating.
Because it seems to me like if we want people to think outside of the box, we need them to realize that the tools they hardly think of as technological have been quietly organizing how knowledge appears to us for a very long time. They’re quietly working in the background; and their output exposes what’s going on behind the scenes. I think this is what makes them a great place to start unpacking the complexity of ideas behind new materialism.
How the elements came together
So I designed a professional learning activity: choose a heated topic, search it in three different tools (Google, Wikipedia, TikTok), and compare what appears. Then unpack: How does each tool assemble knowledge?
I think the session would ultimately take about two hours to work through with a group, but could probably be done in an hour and a half. I have embedded audio files into the presentation with my speakers notes, but have also linked them here if you would rather read them. My presentation slides are directly below.
If you’re an educational technology specialist, a teacher, an administrator or if you make decisions about which tools students use, which platforms teachers adopt, which systems organize learning, I’m inviting you to do something simple:
Pick a controversial topic. Search it in three different places. Compare what appears.
Then ask: What differences did this technology create?
It’s not a complicated activity. But I think it’s a critical and worthwhile one.
Because once you see how Google, Wikipedia, and TikTok assemble knowledge differently, you can’t unsee it. And that’s where the real work begins.
Not in finding the “right” tool. Not in establishing “best practices.” But in developing the literacy to read how tools shape what we can know, and the responsibility to choose—and keep questioning our choices—accordingly.
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