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Search and Society: Reimagining Information Access for Radical Futures

Bhaskar Mitra

TL;DR

The paper addresses the limitation of current IR fairness and ethics work by arguing for a proactive reimagining of information access through explicitly articulated sociotechnical imaginaries and participatory theories of change. It advocates integrating diverse perspectives from HCI, STS, design, law, social justice, and the arts, emphasizing prefigurative politics and plural visions of desirable futures. Key contributions include a framework for open, interdisciplinary engagement; a proposed hierarchy of stakeholder needs that centers societal knowledge production and equity; and concrete starting points for reorienting IR research away from narrow fairness metrics toward emancipatory, democratic outcomes. The work aims to shift IR from a reactive discipline to one that actively shapes future information ecosystems, challenging power structures and fostering global collaboration, accountability, and social good in the age of large language models and retrieval-augmented systems.

Abstract

Information retrieval (IR) research must understand and contend with the social implications of the technology it produces. Instead of adopting a reactionary strategy of trying to mitigate potential social harms from emerging technologies, the community should aim to proactively set the research agenda for the kinds of systems we should build inspired by diverse explicitly stated sociotechnical imaginaries. The sociotechnical imaginaries that underpin the design and development of information access technologies needs to be explicitly articulated, and we need to develop theories of change in context of these diverse perspectives. Our guiding future imaginaries must be informed by other academic fields, such as human-computer interaction, information sciences, media studies, design, science and technology studies, social sciences, humanities, democratic theory, and critical theory, as well as legal and policy experts, civil rights and social justice activists, and artists, among others. In this perspective paper, we motivate why the community must consider this radical shift in how we do research and what we work on, and sketch a path forward towards this transformation.

Search and Society: Reimagining Information Access for Radical Futures

TL;DR

The paper addresses the limitation of current IR fairness and ethics work by arguing for a proactive reimagining of information access through explicitly articulated sociotechnical imaginaries and participatory theories of change. It advocates integrating diverse perspectives from HCI, STS, design, law, social justice, and the arts, emphasizing prefigurative politics and plural visions of desirable futures. Key contributions include a framework for open, interdisciplinary engagement; a proposed hierarchy of stakeholder needs that centers societal knowledge production and equity; and concrete starting points for reorienting IR research away from narrow fairness metrics toward emancipatory, democratic outcomes. The work aims to shift IR from a reactive discipline to one that actively shapes future information ecosystems, challenging power structures and fostering global collaboration, accountability, and social good in the age of large language models and retrieval-augmented systems.

Abstract

Information retrieval (IR) research must understand and contend with the social implications of the technology it produces. Instead of adopting a reactionary strategy of trying to mitigate potential social harms from emerging technologies, the community should aim to proactively set the research agenda for the kinds of systems we should build inspired by diverse explicitly stated sociotechnical imaginaries. The sociotechnical imaginaries that underpin the design and development of information access technologies needs to be explicitly articulated, and we need to develop theories of change in context of these diverse perspectives. Our guiding future imaginaries must be informed by other academic fields, such as human-computer interaction, information sciences, media studies, design, science and technology studies, social sciences, humanities, democratic theory, and critical theory, as well as legal and policy experts, civil rights and social justice activists, and artists, among others. In this perspective paper, we motivate why the community must consider this radical shift in how we do research and what we work on, and sketch a path forward towards this transformation.
Paper Structure (18 sections, 1 figure)

This paper contains 18 sections, 1 figure.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. What do we propose?
  3. Background
  4. Critical perspectives on fairness and ethics research in IR
  5. Towards sociotechnical change
  6. Prefigurative politics in other IR-adjacent fields
  7. Proposals for IR
  8. Where do we start?
  9. Who should do this work?
  10. Why now?
  11. LLMs are changing how we access information.
  12. LLMs are shifting priorities of IR research.
  13. LLMs are raising new sociotechnical concerns.
  14. Our relationships with adjacent communities are changing and so is how we do research.
  15. The world is changing and so is our relationship to that world.
  16. ...and 3 more sections

Figures (1)

  • Figure 1: Hierarchy of IR stakeholder needs. More fundamental and critical needs are at the bottom of the pyramid. This figure is inspired by Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs maslow1958dynamic and Siksika (Blackfoot) way of life ravilochan2021blackfoot.