A quick phenomenology of the world wide web

The world wide web is the birthplace of a citadel, the citadel of a consciousness emerging out of free association.

The world wide web is an artifact of human volition whose venerated past is allowed to speak for its present.

The world wide web is an artifact of human volition the structure of which is made from numerous mathematically expressed reward systems. They function as inducements to persistent often non-conscious interaction with buttons, images, and hyperlinks, which dramatize click selection into web movement. And yet, clicks are the ground zero of marketing campaigns. The advertising landscape vastly outpaces the development of web content to the specific effect that advertisement and distraction increases the computer power it requires from you to represent its media-based plea to buy their things more than the presentation of information that satisfies the specific reasons for which you accessed the world wide web in the first place. The point is to have you distractedly follow as a Hansel or Gretel to the witch's gingerbread house the metaphor of which is meant to represent the inducement built into the target site to keep you looking at it and to satisfy a desire mined from the search words used.

And yes, that's the rub. It's flipped on its head. Content is the visible object. Search is the mechanism that facilitates access to content. And query is the imprint of interface actions, mediated by keyboard, mouse, or others within that category, which provide a trace of human contact. Contact is, supposedly, a recording of volition. But yes, and yes, because yes. Why? Yes because of the jejune reduction of the impact of volition through its representation as an electrical impulse, which makes it no different to a computer than an error related to computer or human. The only conceivable analogy would be to look at the face of a person and to see a pore upon the surface of that vision open into a waterfall through which the visible light that would occupy that part of the face poured. That is the thing. We are constructing from cues what the meaning is to us. A computer responds to data input, which satisfies the computer by being reductive to the capacity to be registered as a discreet and unambiguous register of an input. And so long as we concede in our computer-based interactions to that basic category of input as an I/O register or as a category selection built into the software interface itself we're being reductive for the sake of communicating through a computer. To say that is reductive isn't enough. We're engaged in an OCD-laced interaction with interfaces, which encourages us to improve by typing faster, clicking more accurately, and searching more effectively. And as we improve upon these activities, and to the extent that we invest in our social interactions via process-mediated communication, then we're forgetting the subtlety of co-presence, the sharing of context, and the very real, and really uncomfortable realities of getting along, or disagreeing without resorting to symbolic or other forms of violence.

So in essence, one slice of the phenomenology of world wide web is that we're becoming adept at the interface as a matter of strategic interaction with others. In a sense, the affordances of interfaces today, as noted above, have mathematically expressed rewards. We count likes, we push gaudy self-promotion in order to produce what people agree with and what's agreeable, and it's only because that's the economy of rewards built into the reductive interface of social interaction on the web. We use numeracy to assess fame. We use database search terms to address people, ideas, and things. And we simply participate as data objects for the further accumulation of data objects in a computerized pastiche of hashtags, image tags, self-presentation spaces, public diaries, phatic updates, to effect and affect trends, which have been reduced themselves to what once was called buzz but that is now simply a native component of computing itself: units of measurement, which provide a rubric for measuring word-associated trends. And finally, that trend becomes the salient feature of a person's entrance onto the world wide web: popular searches, trending now; most clicked sites, migrating to the top of a search result; items recommended based upon the interests of others looking at the same thing; shared news stories from a clearly delineated network of contacts.

Are we in the penumbra of a new consciousness? Perhaps we are. We are in the penumbra of an era that is leveraging greater and greater computing power to predict the needs of a web user. Voice recognition, search algorithms, data collection and analysis, all reflect the hopes of the marketer, the fears of the citizen, and the available strategies of computer/web users going forward.

One iteration looks like slavery. You're in your kitchen speaking out loud about what you want to prepare for dinner. The refrigerator hears this, finds a popular recipe for it, scans the RFID tags of all the available items in your kitchen and generates a list of what you need to buy, orders that from your recommended local store, which perhaps launches a drone laden with the required items, which lands upon your doorstep. Slavery requires people. Computers with sophisticated AI are not. But even the simplest of interface designs can trick people and satisfy the Turing Test. And so people readily cede to this army of processors thinking for them because they can be trusted as non-volitional programs, expressly because they aren't people with the consciousness of being held against their will to do the bidding of masters. So we'll have to take a long, hard look at the old Master-Slave dialectic and ask ourselves how this relationship has been modified through the use of anticipatory AI and huge data sets.