Readers as Writers, Writers as Readers

Every sign [. . .] can be cited, put between quotation marks; in doing so it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable. This does not imply that the mark is valid outside of a context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center or absolute anchorage.” (Derrida 12)

What does it mean to enter a word or phrase into a search engine, expecting to get some result? Search terms represent an acknowledgement, in the act of writing, that these terms are citations, that they have already existed in writing somewhere. As Derrida suggests in the above passage, such citations produce a myriad of possibilities supported by a myriad of incalculable contexts. A searcher, therefore, in making a language-based query, pulls matching, fragmented terms from whole documents, recontextualizing them in terms of their own, personal search results. In effect, the act of search is an act of rewriting that which one is searching for, making the potential reader the writer before he or she ever becomes the reader.

To explore readerwriter roles, we will attempt to lay out the properties of search and find. Searching for a term from a bank of others’ knowledge and information means learning to describe it in ways other than you yourself might initially intuit to write—that is, constructing a search term that searches other people’s materials means constructing search terms in their words. To capitalize successfully on the knowledge that is potentially available, therefore, one must learn to think, not collectively, and not individually, but from many different individual perspectives: as many as possible, in fact, for the more ways of searching, the more likely you’ll find a relevant result.

Searching is pattern recognition, because in order to search for something one knows exists or intuits exists, one must identify a meta-description of it. In searching, one isn’t recreating the exact text of what one hopes to find—because the searcher doesn’t know exactly what he or she is looking for. The searcher enters terms that represent some pattern, whether in category, author, group, etc. . . The terms are entered with an expectation that they will return an array of choices; indeed, users of search engines say that the most important thing to searching is getting a wide range of information, not just one piece of information. What this means for the searcher is that the searcher enters somewhat generalized information that could apply to a number of artifacts.

The successful or relevant items returned in a search correspond to the patterns laid out by the searcher; they capitalize on self- and community-generated meta-descriptions—that is, on the references made to them, which confer authority. Therefore, the key to successful searching is learning to write and read patterns in a variety of ways—not only through website content, but also through meta-textual content—that is, through the structure, the captions, the headlines, the keywords, the metaphors, the references, the images, etc.

Just as the act of searching online represents simultaneous reading and writing, perusal of web-based documents is also a reading and writing act. The hyper-textual aspects of text on the Internet mean that a user has a series of entrances and exits on each page, each representing a choice of path. Just as a page of search results in Google represent choice, and therefore, the imposition of the searcher’s intentions on that information, so too, hypertext links offer the reader a chance to write. George Landow, in Hypertext, says this: “All hypertext systems permit the reader to choose his or her own center of investigation and experience. What this principle means in practice is that the reader is not locked into any kind of particular organization or hierarchy” (13). Choosing a “center of investigation” is complicated by the fact that a user does not start from the document—the user must first get there somehow, which means that with multiple ways to access a document, the “center” is as much outside as inside the document.

The ability of a user to choose what pages to read and what hyperlinks to click on “blurs the boundaries between reader and writer,” allowing a reader to, in essence, write his or her own text whose narrative traces its way along the “click-stream” of the user (Landow 13). For there is no rule on the Internet that anyone must read to the end of a work, watch to the end of a video, or even remain on a page for more than the time it takes to click the next hyperlink. This lack of central control or authorship creates a text that is, in the words of Mikhail Bakhtin, “constructed not as a whole of a single consciousness, absorbing other consciousness as objects into itself, but as a whole formed by the interaction of several consciousnesses, none of which entirely becomes the object for the other” (qtd in Landow 11). Information constructed with hyperlinks, therefore, represents a system of communication in which the page a user is reading is not the end of the line, the point where “truth” is transmitted; rather, the transmission of value or force is determined by the movements of a user through that text. Here, again, Derrida’s thinking on language can be applied to the contents of the Internet in his assertion that “writing is read; it is not the site, ‘in the last instance,’ of a hermeneutic deciphering, the decoding of a meaning or truth” (Derrida 21).

So, what does hypertext do in this context? It knives open a text, surgically removing its center and eviscerating it, widening the entrance point, and in fact, flattening the body such that every point is an entrance point. With hypertext, no longer is a text going to remain stable; it will be open to endless recontextualization. Landow theorizes instead “one experiences hypertext as an infinitely de-centerable and re-centerable system, in part because hypertext transforms any document that has more than one link into a transient center, a directory document that one can employ to orient oneself and to decide where to go next” (Landow 12). Here, it is evident that a reader writes his or her own text by choosing where to go among a network of choices.