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.