SEARCHING and SCALES OF BEING

[having just read a little more about the technical side of search engines]

HowThingsWork claims that to search google is to only search half of the searchable web. There are many reasons why a particular search engine may fail to index some sites: they think they're spamming search engines, their spiders don't find it, or they do index it but it never shows up in a user search because they rank the page so low.

So it's interesting that beacon mainly uses dogpile. I think this is because they could get access to it, and it's hard to imagine that this has anything to do with the nature of the queries people type, but it does mean that the results of any particular query (notably outside the frame of beacon) are a smaller-than-50% portion of the web, as dogpile doesn't even rank in the top 5 of search engines in terms of the size of their database. The online version of Beacon does make a point of telling us that it's searching dogpile. I don't think the projected version they installed in NYC mentioned the source.

But inside or outside the frame of the work, just the idea that any given search engine only provides access to a portion of the web (and the WWW itself is only a portion of the Internet, while the internet is generally not searchable in the search engines that most people use, e.g. google, yahoo, ask) is useful. It always feels to me like I'm searching the entire web, that any shortfalls in the results of my queries are more about the fit between my query and the world than about any paucity in the world. But in fact, the vastness of the world opened onto by any given search engine is far smaller than I tend to imagine, although still vast. Does this matter? Do variations in numbers of this size matter? If so, to what? Or whom?

An idea which drives the thought of biopolitics is that power, knowledge and self-knowledge work different at large scales than they do at small. At a biopolitical scale (e.g. the population of single mothers), the knowledge is statistical, kept in databases, indexed...much like the information stored by search engines (accumulated by spiders). It is relevant and not relevant to any given person to whom it applies: they are described by it, they may choose to believe what it tells them about themselves, but the very fact of its statistical being means that there will be some excess, some ill-fit somewhere when experienced at the small scale of individuality. But to the person wanting the large scale view, wanting to experience personhood through the lens of the large scale biopolitical technology, the sense of relevant personhood (single mothers) not only perfectly fits the stats, it exemplifies them. This is the point, because you want to be able to do work with those large numbers, those averages: make distinctions, provide care to some and not to others, etc.

Beacon seems to work at a very small scale: one search at a time, one searcher at a time. The seriality reinforces the sense of individuality given. So does the idiosyncrasy of the searches themselves. Any laugh we might derive, shock, disbelief, etc., any emotional response we have to the voice or intent of a particular search is attributable to exactly one anonymous somebody out there. They are perfectly distinct, perfectly isolated, and this is more true the more idiosyncratic we find the query to be. It's like whatever being+1: plus one quality. Being defined by the single quality or small cluster of qualities named in that search, the one we see until another one fades into view.

But another perspective on seriality says that what gets reinforced by the series movement is not the individuality of any given query in the series (or the singularity of any given painting in Kawara's date paintings, say), but the collection, the population, the X being accumulated slowly over time. Beacon voices this perspective on its work by referring in the supporting documentation to its role as a sample of where "we" are now, or our collective activity. It wants to teach us something about "us." About the sort of collective activity we're about when we do searches. About "our" interests, desires, quirks, loves, confusions, ignorances.... The pace of movement in the series, 1 every 1.5 seconds (online, I think the projected version is a little slower) reinforces this collectivization: the way it accumulates into something like a sociology, reads like a ticker tape of ethnographic data.

But a resonance of the name, Beacon, calls to a third function of the series movement: a beacon stays steady, repeats, so that other changes can be noticed as events. In the case of a beacon on the shore, the beacon lights up steadily, a steady pulse, so ships can recognize the presence of land as a potential change to their path...and avoid it. Steer clear. In that sense, the pulses of Beacon, the individual queries passing by 1 by 1, are more alike than different. The point is that they pulse, one then another; this is the formal view of what Beacon presents that is like the action of a beacon. The action, change, variability, in this sense, lies in the encounter with Beacon (like a ship encounters the light of a lighthouse as a beacon). The encounter marks the potential change that has already crept up on one (following the lighthouse as an exemplar of beacons). Once you've encountered a beacon, something has already changed in your situation. The change is at hand, maybe an immanent danger, maybe just an immanent shift, change, perturbation. Beacon warns of other encounters, more dramatic ones. Beacons produce an encounter that is not dramatic so people can avoid the more dramatic, impactful ones. Here we seem again to be working at a small scale, because the kind of accumulation specific to the repetitious pulse of a beacon is never something that adds to anything: it simply continues, unchanged, never progressing beyond One. One, then one, then one....

So isn't that something that's important about each individual query, understood now for its idiosyncratic content (wish, desire, confusion...), the way that it is a pulse (never changing in order to mark changes elsewhere) and a near-singularity, a whatever being+1 and a piece of ethnographic data, important for itself but only insofar as it sits within a set. And what is THAT status, vis a vis subjectivity? Are those three states that we move between? Being a pulse in the social (voting, buying groceries, or anything branded...despite what the brands tell us about individuality), being whatever being+1 (that is, defined by a single quality, known and knowable only through that quality), and being biopolitical (a piece of data, important for the particular bit we add to the collection, but only insofar as we add up to something bigger, something that is knowable at another scale). Three scales of being, all of which seem strobically present in any online encounter, all of which are telegraphed by, and constitutive of, the strangeness of the queries we see flash by serially in Beacon. [in which case, what of the forced analogy between query or search string and subjectivity?]