Participants of this workshop experienced three different activities which are related to search engines. First, they ranked a series of landscape photos and were alerted to the fact that the result  of their rankings can change depending on algorithms, just like search engines. Then they were asked look up for the actual places of two of the photos, which were all done by using Google. Finally, the participants were asked to discuss in groups what it would have been like to do a similar search back in 1988 when the Internet did not exist, and in 1998 when Google wasn’t around?
This workshop was a pilot program of the  “New Literacy for Media Infrastructure Project” undertaken by the research community of Shin Mizukoshi Lab since April 2018. The project aims to establish new media theory and design educational workshop programs in the era of media infrastructure – from Facebook, Twitter and Google as well as the Internet itself – that has become part of our daily lives in the past two decades. This workshop, which focuses on defamiliarization of search engines, reflects our goal to develop tools for nurturing critical thinking skills towards the function, structure and design of media infrastructure, not only from technological viewpoints but also from political, economic and cultural perspectives.