By Way of Introduction

In the following essay, I will attempt, among other things, to approach the ways in which writing on the Internet represents a marked change from writing as stable, anchored to context and authorial intent. Whether written specifically for use on the Internet or written for print and later placed online, Web-based text has built into it or grafted onto it, certain “meta,” or peripheral, information designed to take into account the users who might search for it or eventually stumble across it. This meta information, including hyperlinks, keywords, images, headlines, titles, and meta descriptions, works on the periphery of the text itself to make its parts accessible to an audience by making them visible and relevant to search engines and Web editors.

Readers within this system are thus empowered to search among and choose between texts and Web artifacts, ultimately writing their “own” narratives based on those choices. This essay will draw parallels between web-based writing and contemporary theory, particularly Jacques Derrida’s Signature Event Context, in order to show how web content demonstrates that essay’s suggestions regarding the ultimate un-anchor-ability of language. It will also seek to contest the standards of print-based writing in order to demonstrate, structurally, the ways in which web-based writing can defy the kind of authority-reinforcing structure by which previous iterations of language were defined. This text, therefore, as should become evident, will contain meta-information designed to facilitate searching within, outside, and around it, which will hopefully open it to interaction with potential readers and within new potential contexts.

One of my main goals in this essay will be to examine the way language constitutes itself on the web by removing any illusion of anchoring in author, intent, stable context, or truth value. I will also attempt to show the way that search is itself a kind of utterance, performative in structure, which changes what it seeks to find in the mere desire to find something. The goal here is not to discourage searching but to suggest that searching using community-generated content, rather than top-down, editorialized content, may help a reader to overcome the limits of categories and space that affect non-digital language, ultimately allowing users to access information that they may not even know to ask for. Searching based on intuition, then jumping off the structures that facilitate searching, moving even temporarily without the aid of meaning-imparting institutions, is a way to find information users never knew they were looking for.

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.