Amy E. Moore, “Writing on the Web: Search as Performative Utterance,” M.A. University of North Florida, 2008.

This essay is an investigation into the effects of the Internet on language, communication, value, and meaning.  More specifically, the essay examines the way language constitutes itself on the Web by removing any illusion of being anchored in author, intent, stable context, or truth-value. Focusing on Internet users, the essay approaches this issue by examining how information makes itself visible on the web, how search engines determine the relevance of that information, and how users in turn participate in the process of valuing Web-based information. The essay suggests that performing a search on the Internet represents a kind of utterance, performative in structure, which changes what it seeks to find in the mere desire to find something, and further proposes that the power of the Internet lies in this ability of users within a community to replace the priority on authority and truth with the value of community. Used as a tool for comparison, Jacques Derrida’s “Signature Event Context” provides the theory of language as open to endless recontextualization because of its possibilities of being cut off from authorial intent or reliable transmission of “truth.” By examining issues of access, relevance, and the roles of readers and writers on the Web, the essay approaches the ways in which information on the web is increasingly less dependent on authority and truth, looking more toward community-generated content as an improved means of determining value for the community at-large.