Storch® is a plug-in for search engines that filters through social media hash tags, users and trending content to provide results relating to inputted key words. The purpose of this function that will be incorporated into search engines is to supply researchers of any academic range with up-to-date information happening on the Internet. It is a way to supplement the articles, journals, images and websites that appear when one hits the magnifying glass icon or the enter key, with the immediate feed of Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Youtube and more social media sources. Through Storch® people will be able to have a notion of the web’s opinion on certain topics, which will be helpful if someone is looking into a current and controversial issues as primary sources social to include in their citations. Christina Hass and Daniel Chandler, who are composition researchers, outline that “technologies cannot be experienced in isolation for each other, or from their social functions” (Kirschenbaum, 13). Storch® makes searchers more complete, as it includes the instant social relationships with that topic. The plug-in could also be helpful in understanding texts, as the questions raised and answered on social media on a specific work can be a collaborative manner to grasp literary concepts – essentially an enormous study group.
Storch® definitely has a market gap as it will ease the process that researchers and analysts have to go through to gain information from social media. Social media is valuable for research because it is the “raw data of history” (Ems, 723), allowing researchers to interpret issues without previous analysis. Students will also have a chance “construct an interpretation of [their] own unhindered by the story’s original trajectory” (Kraus, 95), which will mimic annotating but one will have the contribution of other readers. Kari Kraus outlines how one of her design fiction pupils created a way to incorporate social media whilst reading Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher to deconstruct a “text’s fundamental framework of meaning, however, one can begin both to deform and perform a work as a text that is alive and mutable, rather than a static work with a fixed arrangement” (Kraus, 94). In essence, social media adds a layer of reality with people’s direct reactions to content and it is a more organic comprehension of information, with access to common knowledge.
The search function that Storch® appropriates is much more influential than its educational purposes, as it can be used for extensive research. In a sense, the plug-in goes in a way to extend the “engagement [that] comes with conceptualizing and implementing research projects in digital media” (Hayles, 4). Katherine Hayles explains that scholars build their own databases as a means to record their works but beyond that it allows them “to create different front-eds for the same data, thus encouraging collaboration in data collection, storing and analysis” (Hayles, 4). The possibilities with Storch ® to have live feedback and review on the process through consistent thought sharing, would benefit both the scholars within themselves and the public. This tool is software to help identify sources, demonstrating the evolution of “bibliotextual studies [and how sources have] partially overcome [the] limitation of the book [due to] the myriad forms it has assumed … radically de-familiariz[ing] it” (Kraus, 74). Bibliographies do not have to be confined to printed material and the fact that there are recurrent MLA formatting conferences every year proves how versatile researching can be by using multiple source types, including social media.
The target audience includes researchers and students of a new generation, who use social media as an extension of their own stream of consciousness. Social media users can articulate ideas well, since they have the “tacit knowledge” (Kirschenbaum, 13) of using such technologies to write down their ideas. Using Storch ® will not be odd to this target audience and it will easily fit into the everyday of scholars and search engine consumers.
Storch® is a unique add-on to today’s dynamic technology, as it will give more comprehensive results to searches. Social media is intrinsic to people’s lives, therefore it would not be a frivolous endeavor but a crucial one within the interconnected climate that the web is in the 21st century.
Works Cited:
Ems, Lindsay. “Twitter’s Place in the Tussle: How Old Power Struggles Play out on a New Stage.” Sage Publication (2014): 720-31. Sagepub.com. 4 June 2014. Web. 14 Oct. 2014. <http://mcs.sagepub.com/content/36/5/720.full.pdf>.
Hayles, Katherine. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago: U of Chicago, 2012. Print.
Kirschenbaum, Matthew. Track Changes, A Literary History of Word Processing. N.p.: Harvard UP, 2014. Print.
Kraus, Kari, and Charity Hancock. “Bibliocircuitry and the Design of the Alien Everyday.” Textual Cultures 8.1 (2013): 72-100. Print.