We begin the next session at the SEASON 2025 conference with a paper by Malte Rödl, whose interest is in how people now use the verb ‘to google’, and what this means about the social status of search engines in knowledge contestation. The term is now well established in most modern dictionaries, across many languages; Malte’s focus is on Swedish, where ‘googla’ is the verb form and therefore easily discoverable in online conversations too.
He gathered data from climate denialism blogs, Swedish-language Twitter, and a Swedish ‘free speech’ online forum on climate change, and examined the term in the contexts where it occurred. The overall focus is therefore on suggestions to google for information on climate science, and it seems that googling is then often suggested as a way of contesting knowledge.
Posters were often encouraged to specifically google for information to find ‘credible’ sources; additionally, they also described their broader information seeking activities or intentions, and the practices of others – sometimes critically or satirically. Sometimes people were also encouraged to google for specific information for which a direct link was provided anyway, so it seems that googling can also just mean engaging with such information.
So, possible meanings are to obtain information in general; to reveal ‘hidden’ information and insights that are less easily accessible to the ordinary person; to showcase one’s own general diligence and effort in seeking hard-to-find information, and critique the lack of such diligence in others; and to perform an information practice that itself becomes the topic of the conversation.
Of these, everyday googling is very flexible, open-ended, and unrelated to individual search literacies, while googling as a conspicuous activity is actively uncovering ‘secret’ information that can only be found by ‘doing your own research’. Diligent googling is positioned a marker of digital citizenship, which is also understood as affected by personal intellectual and physical (dis)ability, and overall requires the sustained development of skills and competencies, and the acquisition of the correct vocabulary for effective googling. Finally, googling as a socio-technical information practice contextualises search results as social constructions, and makes the search process available as a topic of conversation. This ultimately also challenges the point of searching itself, noting that anyone can find something to support their own view if they google for particular types of information – so participants highlight the need for source criticism beyond the googling itself.
Googling is therefore positioned as essential to negotiate, cultivate, and contest community-specific insights on climate science and beyond; it is used to both legitimise and delegitimise knowledge claims. When and under what circumstances, then, does digital citizenship become community belonging, and when does it become conspicuous search?
