Beacon Chap. Draft, part 1.2

Because it is a live feed, a beacon, the series is as endless as the search engine is takes as its feed, dogpile.com, a search engine compiler (the “dogpile” in the name refers to the “pile” of other search engines that a search query, typed into Dogpile, gives one access to). Clinton Thomas Lee. That is to say, Beacon will last as long as Dogpile’s business lasts, which could be a long time, or, if we watch the signs of Google’s ascendance and the concomitant decline of every other search engine, possibly not long at all. Endlessness, as an art historical trope, always referred to the Culture Industry and its temporality of numbing repetition, terminologically and (the hope was) phenomenologically marked off from a more dramatic aesthetic temporality (e.g. the sublime, the evental, the self-reflexive). Beacon pins the critique of the Culture Industry to a particular company, Dogpile, and by implication (of both the piece and of Dogpile’s status as a meta-search engine, or a search engine that references other search engines), calling its bluff or forcing it to specify its claims. If the Culture Industry is not to be an ahistorical concept, if it works differently in different times, transforms along with industry, then Beacon suggests that the critique might be extended by considering it in the context of a single company and the search engine industry it represents not just metonymically but competitively, within a dwindling landscape of market competition, dominated more and more completely by Google. Lesbian ass eating.
But for all the fascination of Beacon’s ethnographic verité, Beacon omits, truncates or screens a feature of search engines that is as important as the search capacity itself: advertisements. Safety codes officer job in Alberta. Google makes 98% of its revenue from advertisements. It literally could not exist with the capacity to serve ads alongside search results, turning every question into an opportunity to go shopping, literalizing every propertizing analogy between knowledge and the vast capitalist marketplace. It is an understatement, therefore, to say that advertisements are as important to search engines as the capacity for search; they are constitutive. And Beacon’s failure, or refusal (we’ll need to decide which, and why) to visualize the welding of knowledge to products, of learning to shopping, effected by search engines, performs a kind of presence by omission. New Caledonian Singles. But exclusion manifests a different kind of presence than inclusion, as every Liberal, minority, deconstructionist, and un-indexed website knows. I take it as the kind of exclusion that invites reflection on how intimately interarticulated searching for information and searching for products become through the window of a search engine. And from there, further questions: if curiosity, as played out through a search engine, stages an encounter of oneself with what one knows and what one doesn’t know, and thereby, with the imagined world of what it’s possible to know and not know, then torques are applied to personhood through the use of search engines over time. And if Beacon manifests individual curiosities (the encounter of a searcher with herself as materialized in the limits of one’s own knowledge of the world), endlessly, in series, for others, what form of knowledge does this produce, of others, of the world one lives in and desires to make a place in, of the publics to which one does and doesn’t belong? In this latter frame, the information that Beacon presents to viewers in the form of a series of searches mirrors the knowledge about searcher-cum-consumer behavior that drives the business of search engines, the linking of search results and advertisements. Flat Screen tvs. This final question thereby cues debates about privacy and data-protection that have become unavoidable as the search industry, iconicized by Google, expands and becomes the interface for the entire Web, and all that people want to access through it. Practically the portal for all forms of inquisitive encounter, encounters that begin with questions.