On Patterns, Codes, and Visibility

Marshall McLuhan suggests in The Global Village that “data overload equals pattern recognition.” In A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari suggest that the rhizome, their metaphor for modes of production, including data proliferation, “is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states,” but they go on to state that a “rhizome is made up of plateaus,” which are “always in the middle. . .” Daniel Dennett, discussing evolution and how it tempers an infinite realm of possibilities, asserts,

A system has a degree of freedom when there is an ensemble of possibilities of one kind or another and which of these possibilities is actual at any time depends on whatever function or switch controls this degree of freedom. Switches (either on/off or multiple choice) can be linked to each other in series, in parallel, forming larger switching networks, the degrees of freedom multiply dizzyingly, and the issues of control become complex and non-linear. Any lineage equipped with such an array confronts a problem: What information ought to modulate passage through this array of forking paths in a multi-dimensional space of possibilities?

Although they come from very different theoretical traditions, these authors approach the same problem: that for any given uncontrollable, acentered, dizzying array of information, some—at least temporary—focus, control, or entrance must be present to make pattern recognition, and therefore, visibility (iterability and utterability), possible. With regards to the masses of information found within, on, by, and around the Internet, the portal website, whether it works as a search engine or as a site of recommendation, offers the entrance necessary to make those networks of information visible to users.

What, then, to explore the alternative, would happen were there not some method of accessing, more than once, any given mass of information, specifically writing as it appears on the Internet? As Derrida suggests, “A writing that is not structurally readable—iterable—beyond the death of the addressee would not be writing.” He notes conversely, ‘there is no such thing as. . .[an] organon of iterability—which could be structurally secret” (Derrida 7-8). The implication here is that the only way for a mark to remain secret or invisible would be if it were not iterable, and therefore not a mark. On the Internet, existence as an organon of iterability qualifies the language of a website as a mark, but mere existence doesn’t guarantee that the site will ever be seen. In order for a mark to effectively exist on the web, it must make itself visible to users. So, to answer the question initially set out, without some method of access, any information on the web would be forgotten as soon as it occurred, which would ensure that it wouldn’t ever pick up momentum, let alone create force or effect among its audience.

The earliest problem of the Internet was that although there was a wealth of knowledge and information being stored on servers around the world, there was no method of accessing that information; the information may as well have been invisible because it was not indexed, quantified, or related to anything else on the Internet, which made it not only impossible to search for, but also impossible to stumble across accidentally. In the mid-nineties and before, to even learn of a website one had to have a personal recommendation, invitation, or some other initiation to be admitted into the discourse of “the Web.” What was missing at that time was a tool that could not only itself find and categorize the vast array of information but could also provide entrance to users, so that they could search for the information they felt might be out there, but were otherwise ignorant of.

Repeatable patterns were missing from the early Internet—collections of information had no relation, loose or otherwise, to any other, making navigation a plodding, start-and-stop process that could never be guaranteed a repeat. Without being findable in a reliably repeatable way, information languished unseen by the users for whom it was constructed. Users made queries in attempts to find information but often got no response, indicating that the documents were unable to interact with users—to even let users know “I’m here!” What was missing was a way for information to compose itself such that it could respond to queries posed by searchers.