http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/issue/1/jerz/index.htm

A weblog is a textual genre native to the World Wide Web, comprising a regularly-updated collection of links to other documents, together with commentary that evaluates, amplifies, or rebuts the off-site information. A cross between an online diary and a newspaper clipping service, a weblog is important factor in the ongoing democratization of hypertext – that is, a means by which ordinary people who do not think of themselves as programmers or designers can efficiently harness the power of hypertext, and thereby add their voices to the community of global villagers.

On Saturday, Feb. 15, 2003, the close-knit blogging community was rocked with news that Google, the favorite search engine of geeks everywhere, was purchasing Pyra Labs, developers of the popular weblogging service Blogger (Gillmor). Google is already beloved by many netizens chiefly because it effectively uses the existing link structure of the Internet to filter search results. By reading the network of links and inferring the relative value of pages linked to by human webmasters (that is, by rating higher those pages that other webmasters have recommended), Google’s PageRank formula greatly increases the chances that the best search results will float to the top. Further, its minimalist interface does not bog down the user with periphery features such as the mail, shopping, and community services that clutter up the Yahoo! portal. Supported by licensing deals as well as unobtrusive, all-text advertisements (AdWords) which are served up in a clearly marked column separate from the search results, Google is even confident enough to let users skip advertisements altogether by clicking the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button (which bypasses Google advertisements and takes the user directly to the top search hit).

Recent rumors that AOL may be planning to provide blogging services available to its huge customer base caused grumbles among cyber-elders who recall with bitterness how Usenet forums [1] changed when naïve “newbie” chatter from legions of AOL users put an end to the geek utopia that dominated the Internet’s Golden Age. The Internet intelligentsia has so far responded with a disdainful snort to the clumsy efforts of AOLCNNTimeWarner to create an old media empire in cyberspace, such as the notorious failure of Pathfinder.

Salon, an ambitious general-interest magazine that has burned through millions of dollars of venture capital, jumped on the blogging bandwagon in July of 2002. Its strategy included morphing its discussion groups into a network of blogs, headed by star columnists, and offering special tools to customers who subscribe to Salon’s blogging services. Little in the blogging package appears attractive to customers who aren’t already Salon junkies; the resulting subculture that developed around Salon has an almost uniformly hip, bohemian feel, appropriate for a magazine whose editorial perspective is somewhere to the left of radical, but not nearly as interesting as blogging culture at large. For example, Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment, Salon’s flagship blog, has the narcissistic tagline “News of Salon, Salon blogs, and the world.” Catering to bloggers has apparently done little to boost the magazine’s financial health; indeed, the day before Google’s purchase of Blogger was announced, the Associated Press reported that Salon will likely run out of money and cease operations in a matter of weeks.

Salon has been limping along for year; by contrast, Google’s track record invokes confidence. If anybody can make money off of weblogging–without destroying the freedom and flexibility that makes weblogging so attractive–perhaps Google can. After all, GoogleGroups succeeded where DejaNews failed – offering advertiser-supported searches of more than 20 years of Usenet archives. DejaNews had its own intensely loyal following before it tried, in (date), to turn itself into an e-commerce portal. Unlike DejaNews, however, Google’s advertisements are subtle; Google also permits netizens without access to news readers to post messages to any group in the Usenet hierarchy.

In the world of hacker culture, where Microsoft generally stands for everything evil, Google earns serious geek credibility by running huge arrays of cheap computers that run an ugly but powerful alternative to Windows. The result is a uniformly powerful, unnervingly effective collection of utilities that operate essentially independently from the Microsoft chokehold. Like Henry Ford, who did not invent the assembly line but did master its implementation, Google did not invent the search engine; yet the company’s name is nearly synonymous with the service it provides. Consider the recent formation of the verb “to google,” meaning “to search the internet for information on a person,” when considering that person for a job or as a romantic prospect.

I hope my students will forgive me for letting unanswered rhetorical questions drive my argument, but I cannot help but wonder… does GoogleBlogs somehow cross the line? Searching the WWW and Usenet archives is one thing, but now that the company is moving into hosting user-created content, can it possibly be fair to its competitors? Or, as a recent link popular with weblogs recently put it, is Goggle Big Brother? http://www.google-watch.org/bigbro.html

In his 1945 essay “As We May Think,” Vannevar Bush proposed the memex – a hypothetical document storage and retrieval system. X is a variable, an unknown quantity, the undiscovered country; it differentiates memex from meme – a discrete bit of cultural information, such as a folktale or an advertising jingle, that perpetuates itself by jumping from mind to mind. The design of the memex imitated the workings of the human memory on a scale that promised to make the user utterly dependent upon its workings (as most professionals of today are, practically speaking, utterly dependent upon their personal computers).

The term “meme” was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976, and was intended to echo “gene.” Dawkins sees individual human beings as “survival machines” optimized for self-perpetuation; he struggles to find evolutionary explanations for the development of sacrificial altruism, and admits that his own psychological explanations for the development of moral reasoning beg too many questions. N. K. Humphrey amplifies Dawkins: “memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell” (qtd. in Dawkins 206-7). The idea that web page designs should shock and amaze the viewer was a meme that destroyed countless dot-com startups.

Rather than a helpful tool to increase communication, design became an all-consuming machine. Marshal McLuhan offers the following parable querying the relationship between helpful tools and depersonalizing machines:

As Tzu‑Gung was traveling through the regions north of the river Han, he saw an old man working in his vegetable garden. He had dug an irrigation ditch. The man would descend into the well, fetch up a vessel of water in his arms and pour it into the ditch. While his efforts were tremendous the results appeared to be very meager. Tzu‑Gung said, “There is a way whereby you can irrigate a hundred ditches in one day, and whereby you can do much with little effort …. You take a wooden lever, weighted at the back and light in front. In this way you can bring up water so quickly that it just gushes out. This is called a draw‑well.” Then anger rose up in the old man’s face, and he said, “I have heard my teacher say that whoever uses machines does all his work like a machine. He who does his work like a machine grows a heart like a machine, and he who carries the heart of a machine in his breast loses his simplicity. He who has lost his simplicity becomes unsure in the strivings of his soul. Uncertainty in the strivings of the soul is something which does not agree with honest sense. It is not that I do not know of such things; I am ashamed to use them.” (63)

The gardener in the parable seems to have no problem using tools (such as the shovel, with which he presumably dug the ditch, or the water vessel, both of which mimic the human action of cupping the hands). Yet the old man is “ashamed to use” a machine (a word that comes ultimately from the Greek word for “expedience”) that would allow him to “do much with little effort.” McLuhan’s source for this passage is the memoirs of Werner Heisenberg, who had good reason to hold technology up for scrutiny. Drafted into the German army at the outbreak of World War II, Heisenberg was at the forefront of Hitler’s efforts to create a nuclear bomb—a single-mindedly grotesque exaggeration of the clenched fist. While blogs are creative and often charming tools in the hands of individual bloggers, by harvesting the collective power of armies of bloggers, the power Google stands to wield in online publishing begins to stagger the imagination.

Published during the last few months of the Second World War, “As We May Think” observes that, as scientists returned to civilian pursuits, the production of articles for scholarly journals accelerated. Keeping up with the latest literature was in itself a Sisyphean challenge; yet Bush noticed that even finding the information in the first place required ever more time. His chief complaint was that libraries sorted information according to an externally enforced, inflexible alphanumerical structure. After finding one item the user had to exit the system and start all over again from the beginning. As an alternative to the artificially rigid “index,” he proposed “memex” as a means of filing documents by association, linking them through annotated user-defined “trails.”

Seeing the memex as the direct precursor to the WWW is attractive, but problematic for several reasons. First, and most obviously, the memex (had it ever been built) would have operated on photo-mechanical, rather than digital, technology. Second, the operation of the memex is tied to the physical presence of texts – a stack of densely-printed microfilms, which can be sorted and displayed quickly, but which must first be printed and distributed to a paying researcher. Third, the memex is only additive – the scholar can duplicate pages, but cannot synthesize (by copying and pasting chunks) or inserting or rearranging words in a stream. In fact, the smallest unit Bush works with is a facsimile of a page; thus the medium Bush described was not hypertext, but hyperbinding. Finally, the term “memex” reveals its retrogressive gaze. Bush’s proposal was a tool for accessing those documents a researcher has already decided are worthy of purchasing and adding to his or her personal library, not for identifying texts which have not yet been connected to the user’s personal matrix of intellectually associations.

But even here, Google’s origins are strikingly similar to the memex. Google initially began as a tool for rating annotations, according to Larry Page (inventor of Google’s eponymous PageRank):

We wanted to annotate the web--build a system so that after you'd viewed a page you could click and see what smart comments other people had about it…. We needed to figure out how to choose which annotations people should look at, which meant that we needed to figure out which other sites contained comments we should classify as authoritative. Hence PageRank. Only later did we realize that PageRank was much more useful for search than for annotation... (qtd. in Delong).

Bush designed a hypothetical document-manipulation system that would permit him to be a better researcher, by managing the annotated links he established between documents. The desire to connect and access was also an important motivator for Theodore Nelson, the inventor of hypertext, and Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Where these three scientists chiefly saw an information storage and retrieval system, in Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, GeorgeLandow, a literary scholar, advocates hypertext as a tool for improving textual scholarship, presenting it as a real-world manifestation of the “ideal text” as initially posited by post-structuralists and postmodernists. This ideal text, freed from the physical restrictions of the printed page, eroding the barrier between author and reader, is, according to hypertext theory, infinitely expandable; it can be infinitely explored by a reader with infinite interest in the subject matter.

Over the years Landow has, of course, continued to produce scholarship that addresses current and emerging hypertext issues; but it is through his original book (or indirectly, through sources influenced by it) that humanist “early adopters” were first introduced to hypertext, at a time when tools for reading and creating hypertext were accessible only to the elite. In fact, hypertext theory developed over a period when computers were rare, isolated, stand-alone workstations, and most humanists were far more comfortable with hypertext theory (as mediated by the scholarly essay) than with hypertext itself. Even in the 1997 edition of Hypertext, the index entry for the word “internet” takes up barely more than one line, while entries for the outdated commercial hypertext authorship products “StorySpace” and “Intermedia” each take up two or three inches.