The American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) awarded Richard Rogers ‘Information Politics on the Web’ (MIT Press, 2004) as the ‚ÄòBest Information Science Book of the Year’.

Richard Rogers is Director of govcom.org, an Amsterdam-based foundation dedicated to creating and hosting political tools on the Web, and Assistant Professor in Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam.

Excerpt: Does the information on the Web offer many alternative accounts of reality, or does it subtly align with an official version? In ‘Information Politics on the Web, Richard Rogers identifies the cultures, techniques, and devices that rank and recommend information on the Web, analyzing not only the political content of Web sites but the politics built into the Web’s infrastructure. Addressing the larger question of what the Web is for, Rogers argues that the Web is still the best arena for unsettling the official and challenging the familiar.

Rogers describes the politics at work on the Web as either back-end — the politics of search engine technology — or front-end — the diversity, inclusivity, and relative prominence of sites publicly accessible on the Web. To analyze this, he developed four “political instruments,” or software tools that gather information about the Web by capturing dynamic linking practices, attention cycles for issues, and changing political party commitments.