Databases as Representations (Searching, Hits, Encounters)

(http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/06/21/google_henziger/print.html)

In order to build a database for a search engine, the search engine company must build an “internal representation” of the web, the web’s link structure, and build into that representation the potential for rank, hierarchy vis. individual searches.

This “representation” is based on the company’s “understanding” of what documents are about, i.e. their algorithms are that understanding and a representation of that understanding. They are the part of the search engine that encodes an understanding of how to understand web pages in terms of their potential relevance to an potentially infinite set of potential searches. Talk about potentiality and immanence!

Where potentiality meets hard materiality is when a person conducts a search. Then, the results of that search can only bring back what is immanent in the representation. It cannot bring back what the database does not contain, a document (webpage) that has not been indexed, a word that does not appear in the database, a combination of words that has not been cross-referenced or is not cross-referenceable in the database. The database is potentiality ONLY when the database is being built, when the web crawlers are doing their work. It ceases to be potentiality when queries are conducted: at that exact point in time, the possibilities are not endless. They are vast, but not endless. Not that anyone would notice, but it’s an important distinction (cf. the fact from a post ago that when one searches Google, one only searches about half the searchable content of the web).

A database is a representation.

The other half of the search that a search engine must “understand” is the search query itself. Here potentiality comes back in in the form of unreadability, unpredictability, illegibility of the search. If the search engine cannot figure out what the search is about, then it returns more random hits. So the query is itself a representation, in the eyes of the search engine, and some are more legible than others. Legible or their real wish or desire. “Car” is an ambiguous wish. “Car sex” is a less ambiguous wish. This is true both for human readers and search engines.

So an interesting feature of Beacon is that it puts viewers in the same position that the search engines themselves are in: both are readers of the queries, both are in a position of having to interpret what the query means, what it points to, what it indexes, what it wants. Perhaps the search engine’s reading is a more constrained, instrumental one; perhaps it wants only to know more precisely what the searcher wants to know, get, learn. Whereas Beacon’s viewers, forced into the position of search engine-as-reader, get to have a more wide-reaching curiosity, get to have pathologizing thoughts, more sociological thoughts, make the searcher into a general person rather than a singular person. But the search engine uses rules to interpret the query, which is its own form of generalization: making an individual into a general person on the basis of their wants and wishes, insofar as those wants and wishes are able to be articulated with the wants and wishes of other searchers, insofar as the wants and wishes are generalizable. Where the general probably means repeated; where something like that wish has been seen before, so that it can 1. Be predicted by the database and the crawlers and 2. Be predicted by the program that matches queries to the database, one representation to another.

When a person’s query encounters the search engine database, one representation (of the web as indexed by, say, google) encounters another (a person’s capacity to render their wish in words). A representation of the web meets a representation of a single person’s wish. The results of the encounter are called “hits.” Why hits? Literally, a hit is where a person’s wish hits, impacts, lands in the database. The search engine then returns these hits as results, but they are literally the trace of an impact.

Searching, Beacon

I argued before that Beacon operated like a broken public, invoking Foucault's broken calligram: the figure that invokes its parts only to show their non-fit (as an ongoing condition). For a public, that would mean reflecting people back to themselves in what feels like a public way (having the feeling of looking at information that seems to reach toward some universalized representation), but that never achieves publicness in that sense, never becomes universal, never becomes a picture, remains a series of searches that are hard to read. That don't seem to add up. But that still feel, and maybe for that fact feel, evocative, mysterious, strange, odd, repulsive, confusing. My sense of its publicness, then, was an effect of its status as data. It seems to present us with data, culled from the web, streamed in real-time. It's formal markers point to its status as data: real-time, quoted, simply cut and paste or streamed and not manipulated, one after another...like ticker tape.

[aside about ticker tape: how did it work, when did it stop, who invented it and why? 1867, Edward Calahan, for stocks, from a Telegraph company. Edison too. Text output in readable text, not morris code. Obsolete in the 1960s with computer tech and faster real-time]

Also its plainness. It presents as very little but the search strings themselves. Data here would be the stuff that gets made into representations of the public: census, voting stats, pre-poll stats, demographics, marketing. But data has an unofficial status too: that which we all collect, our own nonce-polls, our own observations of how many women are wearing heels this year, of how many men are or are not wearing suits, or the color pink. Berlant calls this the stuff that forms the lineaments of individuality, where individuality is a shell of conventionality lived in as specific (particular details) and generic (genre: a genre of self). I think Beacon presents data in that idiom: the idiom people use, and read (Ranciere) as the basis for trying to know something about the world. Here, how people search, but maybe more centrally, more obviously, what people desire. And less generously: what people do when they're alone, when they think no one is looking, when they are indulging their grossest fantasies, etc. The kind of individuality Berlant describes, a way of living inside conventionality as a life, as one's own life, needs data. It needs to track btw its own behaviors and what it takes to be conventional; it needs to notice the difference in the small details, the small deviations from center, but also notice, however consciously or un-, the bigger shell of conventionality one inhabits as normativity, as a mode of power or invisibility or just getting by. I think Beacon presents data in that general genre of data. It looks like it, functions like it.

But my sense of brokenness before was an intuition that it doesn't finally work that way, it can't get you there, it doesn't add up, even though it adds and adds, serially, endlessly. Still though, something does change over time with the watching. Maybe it's not knowledge that results (although i guess one could count the number of porn searches; one could count all sorts of things; one could make proper data), but it's something more than random. Affective data? Data that only registers as feelngs in a body: fascination, boredom (I wonder), prurient curiosity.... I think if Beacon captures people in any way, it starts with affective data: the registration of data on/in the body as affects. Something seems fascinating or weird or off. This is true even before one understands what one is seeing, when one thinks it's just a strange serial text piece.

Two fascinations that might arise:
-how could someone want that?
-how could someone type that?

So Beacon figures a relation between desire and articulation, the intimate space we may or may not hide from others (or be able to hide from others) and the unfolding of those desires into the world in the form of searches: tactics for getting what we want. How to make the world respond to you, to give you what you want. How to carve out a little place for yourself where your desires get met. The semantics of the search string ARE those tactics. Writing one's self becomes the means for making a world for oneself, for one's desires [this is speaking only of searching in general; not necessarily how it manifests in Beacon]. Is it ever so correlated? So direct? You write to get what you want. A recipe, gay porn, relief (pictures of cute animals in google image). Is this a quality of the impact of reading the strings in Beacon? Their directness, the tight correlation between desire and means for getting it? It is fascinating to watch that correlation write itself in the form of short banal strings of words that skip grammar in favor of directness. Even the grammar of the strings mirrors the correlation: skip the words that don't help, that don't extend a referent toward the object of desire. "The" and "a" won't get you there, specificity and generality, the and a. Skip those. Adjectives help (big, gay, hot), nouns are the bedrock of any search (recipe, roses).

How does desire normally write itself? What idioms? How direct? What indirections and why those indirections? Self help books that encourage people to ask for what they want encourage people to make tighter the correlation between their desire and their language for getting it. Just ask for it. But first you have to know it. That's another feature of Beacon: every search string seems to be authored by someone who knows just what they want. Some are VERY specific. Others are more vague, as though they are looking around for their desire, where desire is an open space, where it could be many things. And if they don't appear to know what they want, isn't this an effect of being unskilled at the idiom? We might imagine that people are frustrated, knowing what they want, but not able to make the world return it to them. It's out there, why can't I find the words to bring it back. (This is a different sense of "it's out there" than J. Dean's, which is a treadmill goad to producing the false sense in people that they are participating in democracy, and that therefore democracy is working. Search engines formalize (make possible) the hope that, if only one can find the right words, just the right string of un-grammatical words, one can make a little moment in the world where the world returns what they wanted, however small. But here the form counts. Maybe getting a small thing contains a very small, static, formal version ofgetting a big thing. It takes the form of satisfaction, worlding oneself, but with less intensity. Although, is intensity everything here?

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."