Welcome to the World Wide Web

Chances are you haven’t had much experience navigating the various kinds of spaces that have begun cropping up in what is increasingly being referred to as “the Internet.” It will be helpful, then, for you to think of this space as a sort of library, or maybe a city. Or a circulatory system.

Maybe a superhighway? It is hard to believe that in just eight years since its original printing, “our long-term cognitive abilities” have, in fact, caught up with “the immediate paradigm shifts underway between print and electronic sources.” We do not need to “rely on imagined geographies from the physical world to describe and comprehend complex discursive spaces.” Or if we do, we certainly don’t think about it and don’t need an article to tell us how. In fact, I think it is more likely that our students would rely on imagined spaces from the Internet to describe complex geographies in the real world. Sidler’s article maintains that the Internet is a confusing place that cannot be understood without relying on metaphors of the real world, which I think is somewhat outdated.

The other article from Computers in the Composition Classroom shows its age less, despite being written earlier. However the authors are somewhat vague about everything, and their discussion of web literacy could fairly easily be transposed to any other sort of literacy. Perhaps that is the point. But I think they miss some opportunities to discuss the interesting new things going on with the Internet, particularly in their discussion of the interplay between text and image, which they keep hinting at but never really say anything about. All of their examples in this section involve only images, not text.

Johndan Johnson-Eilola’s article is perhaps the most interesting, if only for the unusual ideas it presents. He stresses that all texts are intertextual, and that it is impossible to write without referencing some other written work. He moves to a discussion of Intellectual Property law, and then to the somewhat startling conclusion that databases and search engines should be considered texts.

I was initially (and, I suppose, still am) hesitant to accept this. Just because texts are, in a sense, a collection of other texts doesn’t mean that all collections of texts are themselves a text. Or does it? I think my problem here is that a traditional text is created with a certain amount of authorship. The writer collects various texts for a purpose. The creator of a search engine, however, simply creates an algorithm that allows a computer to search through a huge variety of texts and find certain words and phrases. The only real “authorship” here is the ability to privilege certain types of connection between search terms, and that is questionable at best.

Weinberger would probably like this idea of search engines as text, since he goes nuts for anything remotely “miscellaneous.” But I think it is this very - and I apologize in advance for this one - miscellaneity that causes search engines to be different enough that to analyze them in the same way as an intentionally composed text implies similarities that do not exist. Instead of lumping these two things together, we should be investigating them as separate, if somewhat related, entities.