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.

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”; 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 suggestion 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,” and 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.

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.