Stand in front of a railway flap sign, a historical form of today's electronic time schedule, and you see, above you, a grid of numbers, letters and symbols for keeping time that changes rhythmically, but unpredictably. Changes are accompanied by a mass of noise, the simultaneous flapping of hundreds of letters and numbers, changes marking the arrival of a new train on the board, the progress of time as a schedule of arrivals and departures, all trains and their itineraries moving to the left to give way to a new train added to the right, signaling that time is moving forward and so is the schedule.
You search the board to find "your" train: the train you had planned to take, the train you always take, the train that you know is due, was due 5 min ago, 20 min ago. Or you search the board to find the train the best suits you: the one leaving soonest, the one with the fewest stops, the one that gets you to the right connection point. You scan the board for times, for place names, for changes to time or place. The board keeps you abreast of changes as they happen; it also helps you to synchronize the time of your day with the schedule of trains, to catch up, or to inhabit the lag of waiting.
The railway sign seems to lay out all that there is to know. The total corpus of knowledge about the trains at that particular moment; changes to this corpus are marked by the noise and visual disarray of the flapping sign. Because of this appearance of completeness, any ideas you might get about knowledge that is not represented makes you a paranoid (which doesn't mean that you are wrong; it simply means that you believe appearances are never all that there is). [whereas search engines work, in part, because they foster in us the radical imagination of limitless information, IF ONLY we can figure out the right sequences of letters and numbers to get us there. The flapping digits of the search engine are the flappings of our furious typing and re-typing, perfecting the query].
The railway sign also presents knowledge about a knowable, more or less visualizable entity: a network of trains. The railway sign thus offers access, through semiotics, through visual scanning, through the right positioning of our bodies beneath and in front of the sign, to knowledge about the workings of a network [whereas search engines use a network to give us knowledge that seems to be about something else: it figures content as the object of our search, while form is the network itself]. The train network, represented by the railway sign, appears as a grid of time and timings, the salient information for railway sign searchers being the timing of arrivals and departures. There is a limit to this network, although it is vast, although marketing for train transportation often tantalizes with the allure of "going anywhere." But there is an empiricism as work in even the most idealistic of train slogans: you can look it up on the sign: a train either goes there (today) or is doesn't (today or ever). There are railroad tracks that go there, or there aren't. [whereas books like "Invisible Web" hyperbolize the endlessness of our already endless imaginations for what might be out there, for what the Internet's network might contain, if only...]. Looking at a railway sign, we place ourselves amidst the possible. [Looking at a search engine's blank field, we take our chances with a space that search engines themselves encourage us to believe goes on and on without cease.] The network of trains can be visualized by a grid of symbols which is finite because the network of trains itself is finite. In this sense, it is not a network at all. But calling it a network of trains is denotatively sound; it also helps us mark a difference. Call it a grid-network.
Search engines visualize the Internet network with a blank rectangular field (the search field) in order to imply the limitlessness of the field to be searched. The search field places the epistemological onus on the searcher, not on the search engine. Search Engine's famous secrecy about their algorithm augments this implication. Older search engines, called directories (e.g. Yahoo), presented a list of categories rather than an empty field. One scanned the categories like an index, or a railway sign. The categories seemed to measure the extent of what there was to be known, to hint at, if not actually demarcate, the boundaries of that space. This was a space of places (Castells, Shaviro). The empty search field indexes a space of flows (Castells, Shaviro, Jameson), which is the space of finance capital in the midst of which search engines like Google now thrive.
Beacon thinks about the form of a search field. It visually echoes the empty search field with its austere online version. It maps that open field onto the field of projection (see Cavell on projection and screens) in its installation version. And it jams that open form, a space of flows, into the grid-network or space of places form of the railway sign [here talk very precisely about the form of the fit; the precise way that the open search field fits within the grid-network search field].
Showing posts with label network. Show all posts
Showing posts with label network. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Thursday, May 22, 2008
That Which Wants to be Found
If the CI is in the business of producing blandly homogenizing products with the appeal of uniqueness, they are also in the business of making products that are there to be found, sometimes with an appeal of being hard to find.
The feeling of uniqueness and the feeling of rarity would both be CI tactics, marketing tactics. Each evidence, in the POV of CI critique, for the truth that lies beneath them: all products are the same, all products want to be found.
If all products want to be found, then searching for them is a sham, a put-on, a feeling the product cultivates in people to make the product more attractive. That's all. In this sense, searching takes the form that J. Dean says it takes in Publicity's Secret (where searching for information produces the feeling that democracy is at work, is working, that a critical public sphere exists).
Example: the atrophied, vestigial adjective "indie" in the music industry signals lots of things, but one of the most important is that this band is still hard to find, still rare, i.e. finding them accrues cultural capital to the finder. Searching for art, being the one to find it, is still a valued activity with middle-brow cachet. Curation in one of it's worst modes would be this taken to an extreme, made into an art: a curator would be one who has the best taste in art, where that taste is the product of diligent, thorough, expensive, eagle-eyed searching. Knowing where to look, how to cull, how to sift. Having good taste bespeaks a skill for surfing networks, for getting around, for finding new sites. One has one's set of reliable places to look, but before that, more mysterious, and harder, is the skill of finding new places to look. Searching for new places to search.
Galloway's thesis about networks and protocols applies here. In my reading (as a start anyway), a protocol would be a set of rules for constraining the kinds of searching one can do through that network.
But I don't love the part of the CI critique which has to produce an illusion in order to produce a Real underneath (that only the critic can access, or see, or live). In part, because it makes knowledge too exclusive. But it also puts too much faith in knowledge (how would it help someone to know that their pleasure in searching for new music, their pleasure in finding something new, being the first, is just itself a desired and planned and homogeneous marketing ploy? Would they be less pleased? Would they revolt?). The feeling of pleasure in the search is something in itself; not just illusion, deception, CI administration of life.
So there is pleasure in searching. And there is also cachet, cultural capital. In searching itself (knowing how to make google give you the results you want), and in searching for particular things (new wines, new music). The cachet in searching for particular things comes from being able to make sense, or produce a system, from an overwhelmingly large market. The market for music and for wine, for instance, are bigger than any one person could get around. This is true of the Internet itself. Cultural capital comes from being able to make sense of it, to produce value and meaning out of it (good bands, good wines; stuff no one else knows about) despite its grandiosity, its near infiniteness.
Is all this to imply that finding value in skillful searching is a middle brow activity, in that it always points to having good taste (in bands, in wines, in search engines)? Are there low brow equivalents, equivalents among the poor? I'm asking how classed an activity is searching? And the value ascribed to skillful searching?
The feeling of uniqueness and the feeling of rarity would both be CI tactics, marketing tactics. Each evidence, in the POV of CI critique, for the truth that lies beneath them: all products are the same, all products want to be found.
If all products want to be found, then searching for them is a sham, a put-on, a feeling the product cultivates in people to make the product more attractive. That's all. In this sense, searching takes the form that J. Dean says it takes in Publicity's Secret (where searching for information produces the feeling that democracy is at work, is working, that a critical public sphere exists).
Example: the atrophied, vestigial adjective "indie" in the music industry signals lots of things, but one of the most important is that this band is still hard to find, still rare, i.e. finding them accrues cultural capital to the finder. Searching for art, being the one to find it, is still a valued activity with middle-brow cachet. Curation in one of it's worst modes would be this taken to an extreme, made into an art: a curator would be one who has the best taste in art, where that taste is the product of diligent, thorough, expensive, eagle-eyed searching. Knowing where to look, how to cull, how to sift. Having good taste bespeaks a skill for surfing networks, for getting around, for finding new sites. One has one's set of reliable places to look, but before that, more mysterious, and harder, is the skill of finding new places to look. Searching for new places to search.
Galloway's thesis about networks and protocols applies here. In my reading (as a start anyway), a protocol would be a set of rules for constraining the kinds of searching one can do through that network.
But I don't love the part of the CI critique which has to produce an illusion in order to produce a Real underneath (that only the critic can access, or see, or live). In part, because it makes knowledge too exclusive. But it also puts too much faith in knowledge (how would it help someone to know that their pleasure in searching for new music, their pleasure in finding something new, being the first, is just itself a desired and planned and homogeneous marketing ploy? Would they be less pleased? Would they revolt?). The feeling of pleasure in the search is something in itself; not just illusion, deception, CI administration of life.
So there is pleasure in searching. And there is also cachet, cultural capital. In searching itself (knowing how to make google give you the results you want), and in searching for particular things (new wines, new music). The cachet in searching for particular things comes from being able to make sense, or produce a system, from an overwhelmingly large market. The market for music and for wine, for instance, are bigger than any one person could get around. This is true of the Internet itself. Cultural capital comes from being able to make sense of it, to produce value and meaning out of it (good bands, good wines; stuff no one else knows about) despite its grandiosity, its near infiniteness.
Is all this to imply that finding value in skillful searching is a middle brow activity, in that it always points to having good taste (in bands, in wines, in search engines)? Are there low brow equivalents, equivalents among the poor? I'm asking how classed an activity is searching? And the value ascribed to skillful searching?
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