Making It All Happen

Search engines, in their freedom to count any information as “relevant” regardless of truth value or authorial intent, echo Derrida’s discussion of communication in Signature Event Context, in terms of “freeing the performative from the authority of the truth value, from the true/false opposition, at least in its classical form, and [substituting] for it at times the value of force” (Derrida 13). This concept of the performative in the context of Internet search is especially relevant because of its identity in force, rather than its meaning in an author’s intent or its truthfulness. Derrida defines the performative as an utterance which “produces or transforms a situation” and serves as “a ‘communication,’ which is not limited strictly to the transference of a semantic content that is already constituted and dominated by an orientation toward truth” (14). Here, the term “search query” is a “performative,” for any series of terms entered into a search engine with the intent of creating a list of results and possible choices is an utterance that “produces or transforms a situation.” Additionally, that a search query entered into the blank box on Google’s home page could be any combination of words adhering to grammar or not, with regard for “truth” or not, makes it performative in its existence as a “communication” not “limited strictly to the transference of semantic content.”

To return to the idea that a search query is performative with the built-in ability to transform a situation, we must acknowledge that this Internet version of the performative utterance comes in the form of a question. A search term or phrase, whether fragment, “mashed potatoes” or “mashed potato recipes” or full interrogative “how do I make mashed potatoes?” always asks a question. This question, when used to activate the search algorithms of a search engine, then pulls up page after page of results, effectively materializing that information for the user. Thus, the retrieval of a web-based artifact through some imperative or some interrogative, that is, some performative statement or action, as described by Derrida, “produces or transforms a situation, it effects” (Derrida 13). These artifacts, therefore, must be written to be read; they thus become rewritten into a new context: the context of the question to which they serve as answer.

The search query thus constitutes a performative utterance in its calling up of information. It describes the thing which it intuits is out there but for which no location is known, while it also calls that thing into being by entering a search query that is answered by the text’s materialization. The text is then transformed as the result of being called forth in search because it becomes a new answer and thus a new text each time it appears in response to a different string of search terms.

What You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know

Taking a cue from Shirky, we can suggest that since units of content on the Web don’t have to adhere to any of the particular constraints of categorization or space that served as the condition of their creation, readers and writers on the web are free to reenvision whatever model of organization makes sense or is useful, even temporarily. This is happening in all kinds of sites, from del.icio.us to stumpleupon to youtube to many other user-generated websites designed to remain as much in flux as the users who access them daily, hourly, and on a constant streaming basis.

Here, the past and present of web search can be pulled together to demonstrate effect on the user. Whereas in the beginning of the Internet familiar categorization schemes were necessary to let users know what existed, the now assumed presence of all meaningful information makes it possible for those former schemes to be jettisoned. What this means for users is that previously held notions of language being tied to authorial intent, a single context, or some purported truth value are being dispelled in favor of a realization that information is only relevant in its ability to interact with users, not in its static value independent of them. With texts thus open to constant recontextualization, readers, writers, and web users have the ability to see language from a variety of perspectives and contexts, based on the language not just of the author, but based also on their own language in tension with the many users who have also tagged that information.

Readers on the web, then, have the ability to see information from others’ perspectives, allowing them to find things they themselves may not have had the language to know how to ask for. This is one of the main powers of the web—that is, the possibilities laid open by searching for something we cannot name, and finding things we never knew we were looking for. Therefore, as we sit down to a terminal, it is anything but.