being data

Being data.


The most relevant current application to this notion is found in Twitter, which marries a mark-up language to everyday talk. Twitter employs a simple mark up language to facilitate data sorting and searching while the very data are the twitter identities and topics: @ for identities and # for metacommunication, context, or topics.

The economics of being searchable are enabled through a data-sorting approach like Twitter’s. It makes the person do the work of being searchable by posting and properly tagging content. Twitter strikes a balance between content sharing/creation and content search. The potential for Twitter to scale interaction from one to many distorts content along the motivational vectors that define how we chase fame by remaining relevant to a right now. This can be done by providing relevant meaning to the unfolding events from which public opinion forms. That tweets are limited to 140 characters reveals the contours of an information management strategy that engenders platform neutrality. This facilitates the spread of tweets across media technology platforms and keeps them manageable within small mobile view screens. It also limits discourse to that which can be read and understood in mere seconds.

Considering how Twitter and other modes of online/mobile/media interaction operate as searchable persistent content, the limits of content, context, and relevance serve as a mode of oppression operating at the level of the interface’s functionality. In other words, these limits are the boundaries of algorithms that define and sort content. Their existence and function disavow the ambiguities that we find residing between the choice of one word over another. Our successful use of Twitter becomes the performance of the function of a software application by how our actions represent a concession in our creation of content to its operational requirements, its function. Furthermore, personal relevance and identity suffer from being in the penumbra of search. Therefore, oppression is also a function of not being found or found not relevant through others' search. The effect is subtle and pervasive. Discourse becomes heavy, tethered to search categories, which allow it to persist through time. Participation (i.e., content creation) concedes to the needs of a distracted and increasingly mobile and multitasking audience. Content is motivated by the unfolding of events that require meaning (i.e., helping to inform public opinion) and entertaining the ephemeral boredom of a swipe-happy mobile interface user. Oppression reveals itself in the manner that we form an identity to grab the attention of and entertain others. At the heart of much of this activity is human strategy. When we shift from searching content to content providing we swap roles from court royal to that of jester. The oppression at this level is more where content bleeds into search strategy, which has the effect upon how we imagine and appeal to an audience that exists merely as a coincidence of search and click.

In the context of an increasingly participatory media experience we become content providers for others and superficially perform the functions of providing news and entertainment. Others find our content by name, search relevance, and key words. These limit interactions to one front-loaded by topic relevance and the desires revealed by the search initiated. Search is participation in a media environment as well, and it generates data. It also serves as an editorial function, in that it can limit what one sees to that which is relevant to the search term. The information ghettos we create through our desires preceding search and the resulting matches of that search are an important aspect of an online identity. Search is the motivational context for accessing information, which in turn is how we ‘travel’ the web.

Every aspect of the web requires users' labor for meaning formation both in interpreting and in making content. Subsequently, the strategies employed in both activities lead to a practical set of self-imposed limitations upon choice. These limitations are a revelation of praxis, that is, the action and its motivation in context. It's a thin line to draw between meaningful action and brute action, but that's all that is needed to dam discourse in order for networks to turn our experiments in web-based altruism into a proprietary database of experience. Through the machinations of search algorithms, search strategies, and click those experiences become solutions. The query and the initiator of this query, the user, are in a weak position to the search engine's artificial intelligence. It is weak because a user requests knowledge from search, and is limited by an already limited understanding of the subject.

"The fog of search," like the fog of war, is an apt analogy for our interface with something much larger than our own thinking can allow. The world wide web is the amber of our contemporary culture, our history, and our daily dallying. Search is how we 'move' through it to find what we need. Search provides an acceptable and required limit to our pursuit of some media production. But it also paints the totality of our picture. Search is what is, in spite of all that is there. The fog of search is the fog of ware. Software, code, the material infrastructure that support a functional web and our interaction with it are reduced to a model of need expressed through a search query typed into a blank search field. A wise man once stated that rhetoric is what rhetoricians do. I'll adapt that to state, unwisely, that search is the web. Why else would the NSA be cataloging all human interaction passing through its infrastructure? We are at a weak position to the vast amount of information that exists. A search engine provides us with a placative means of interfacing with it. To have it all in your hands with a means of accessing it all in any number of ways can be both a liberating gesture to those whose activities are being held and consistently missed by the limitations of search and cataloging. It can also be a means of controlling that which has always been outside of our grasp physically but at least hazily understood mentally as 'it all.' The meaning of the web is like the meaning of existence. Its the focus of a 'religious' caste bent on providing meaning to those who live through it. The point being is that no conscious effort alone could give it sufficient meaning. Likewise, no manner of search could meaningfully find 'it all' in a manner that is useful to consciousness. The web, in its totality, like our existence in time, is but a vague horizon we use to provide a bearing upon our existence in it. And people will continue to derive power by dressing that horizon up in ways that motivate our sense of our self and our actions in it.