Searching (after talk with Abby B.L.)

There is something optimistic about google searching. The very fact that it's possible makes one feel that an answer is there. Abby sometimes puts in questions that can have no answer (cf. Thomson and Craighead's tea towels) just to go through the feelings of forming the question, then sitting in proximity to the process whereby (albeit with other questions) there might be an answer. Just going through the form of searching, formulating the search, makes it feel as though one is near some possibility.

The point being that search engines seem or promise to put their users in contact with, however attenuated, however frustrating and tangential, some massive set of resources, knowledges, jokes, gossips, images, photographs, news, politics.... I think this probably wasn't true when search engines were new. I remember the dominant feeling being that there MIGHT be info that I need out there, but that I had no idea how to bring it back. I didn't know the idiom, it felt like another language, someone else's language. To feel frustrated, I didn't need to feel that I could find the answer to any question (I don't think I felt that way); I just needed to know that there might be an answer to the specific thing I wanted.

Now, I think it's different. And it's not just all felt as information. It's a massiveness, a repleteness. More entertainment than anyone could way. More knowledge. More facts. More gossip. More politics, More anger and more love and more porn. It's always n+1 to one's imagination and capacity. It's an endlessness of time and materials.

In part [because I just finished reading the Exploit, Thacker and Galloway] this is a network effect, because networks connect, they spread, they move outward, they gather. Search engines put one into contact with a network, allow one to spread out inside a network that they call into being from the larger network, with a search term. The search string conjures that network. It makes it.

Whatever one feels, it's felt in the face of that massiveness: calm, focused, pragmatic, problem-solving, exhilarated, bored, overwhelmed, confused...all felt at the portal to the web. But there is an empirical question here: how do people feel (1.) about their visualization of the web (2.). Do they visualize it as large? As impossibly big? As overwhelming? As containing the total set of anything they'd need? Or as always excluding that set? Excluding JUST that set? I imagine this would influence how people felt about their own search terms, maybe even influence how they formed their searches (e.g. formed to exclude a LOT of stuff right off the bat, i.e. very specific, or, formed to include as much as possible, i.e. very general because one doesn't think a lot will come back).

I could actually try to learn something about this by watching Beacon: i.e. watch for how general the terms are, and how specific. What they are general about (these would be things that, possibly, people don't feel there will be a lot of information about, wishes they feel alone in holding, desires they feel won't be provided by the world), and what they are specific about (the world is replete in resources for fulfilling that wish, reciprocating that desires, so much so that I want to narrow my search, cast smaller the net of my belonging, I don't want to belong to the wider set of all X. With porn, e.g., one might not want ALL the porn, might not want to feel included among a set of all porn, all fetishes, all desires, might feel that their own desire is more particular, maybe even is killed or negated or dampened by the larger set, so the search string is more constrained, one tries to produce a smaller network for oneself, where that network is a form of belonging, the form of belonging for that minute).

To create one's own network with a search string is to create a form of belonging. One might feel that they already belong to X, and the search merely instantiates it (i.e. in an instant of form-making). Or one might feel that they desire to belong to X, and the search string is a vector in that direction. A movement toward some vague something, a feeling, nearness. The writing of the string itself might be this feeling, might create the desired feeling of with-ness. To sit in a room and articulate the desire to oneself and then sit in front of a computer with the intention of forming that desire into words, but not just any words, words that use an imagination for what's our there, for the resources the world brings to one's desire, for how big or how small, for how populated or underpopulated that desire, and then types some words experimentally (knowing you can do it again, re-vise) to see what comes back. To type the search string is to materialize one's imagination for what resources the world/web has to offer one's desire. If one feels that one belongs to some world, the idiom of the search string is a sounding bell, an attempt to send out a sound that returns evidence of some place, some others, some information, some events that feel like what one was looking for.

Not to romanticize it. Not everyone is looking for porn. Sometimes one just wants to know the name of a film long forgotten. One types into google because it's easier than remembering the URL of the IMDB database. Or one doesn't have IMDB bookmarked but they do google. So it's easier and all that's wanted is a single piece of info, something that's driving you crazy. This comes up in social events all the time: the group can't think of something and someone says "google it" or "wikipedia" it. In those situations, one KNOWS the answer is there, but somewhere else, but all around in the sense that, in a city, one is sitting inside a wireless network. More than one at almost all times. It's harder to talk about belonging in these instances. Although...the form of the process is the same. And maybe the way to talk about that repetition, the fact that it's always the same process to type a search string, no matter what you're looking for, is to talk about some search strings connecting one up with one's own memory, experiences, past. The belonging one seeks, in the attempt to type a string that produces the right network, is a re-belonging to one's own experiences (cf. see if Joan Scott resonates here!), one's own memory and past. "I know I saw that," "I know I used to know that," and it will drive me crazy to know that I know but not recall. A search engine here is a relief; it relieves one of the feeling of estrangement from one's own past. I'd rather say it this way than say that search engines are destroying our memories.

And again, the important point for me is that, to the extent that I want to talk about belonging, it's a VERY undramatic form of belonging, sometimes barely there, sometimes barely a feeling. It doesn't have to fill a massive need, a big want; it can just be a momentary thing, even a feeling with no history, no past, no past of unfulfillment, but it also might. A queer in a small town (who wrote this essay that I'm thinking of???) using the internet to be connected to a community of queers (Miranda XXX, who wrote the book about belonging?), to make that community for oneself, to feel connected to sex and to bodies and to feel less alone in one's marginality. This is a kind of now-classic use of the internet to produce forms of belonging that one desires but has no resources for in daily, proximate, geographical life. Life close to home. So one types a search string with the hope of producing a nonce-network, where that network will be partially mimetic (mimetic, but with good surprises) to one's own desire for X, to one's desire for belonging to X, and then sifts the results of what returns. The results are evidence, at first, I'm guessing, not of the failing of the world to return one's desire, to reciprocate with something, but of one's errant language for finding it...

[here a very good example of what Thacker and Galloway mean when they talk about language being so important in network politics]

...so I wonder how many searches one has to type before feeling that it's not their idiom that's the problem, but the world that's the problem, e.g. that there are no foot fetishists in the world, rather than, there are none that I can find? This is an interesting tipping point: where one tips from a focus on one's own capacities for producing belonging for oneself, or finding it, to a focus on the world's resources for providing. Of course, the world here is microcosmed. Just hte net. But it is a microcosm. So it's a small version of, or playing out of the point where one thinks of oneself as the cause for all shortcomings in the world (disciplinarity) in relation to the point where one can start to think of the world as bearing some respoinsibility for those shortfalls (politics). Tipping from "depressed..." to "...it might be political."