Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Internet Cultures and Practice
Practical systems encompassing objects without humanly semantically
assigned metadata or without direct and independent access to that meta-
data (where it exists) have proliferated. Systems inherit patterns of signifi-
cation from orality as well as from written literacy, suggesting historically
deeper and socially wider roots compared to humanly assigned metadata.
Patterns of signification commonly encounter with computational proc-
esses and a crucial tension exists between the linearity of writing and cut-
ting from a line. Through both direct use and the secondary effects of their
use, practical systems mediate to effects outside information retrieval.
Practical understanding of appropriate and market-accepted tech-
niques for information retrieval from written language has preceded
and seemingly is independent from the theoretical elements derived here
from Saussurean linguistics and information theory. However, analogies
between practices and theory and the possibility of more deliberately and
theoretically informed developments could be established. The assumption
that relevance is a function of the meaning of verbal forms can be qualified
by recognizing the influence of such features as quality, with consensual
notions of quality implemented in page-ranking techniques and the sig-
nificance of socially distributed knowledge embodied in such techniques
anticipated by social epistemology (Shera 1952/1965). Google's practice
of displaying the surrounding line of search terms in retrieved references
embodies an understanding of the value of the immediate syntagma in ini-
tial (but not necessarily final) disambiguation (Google 2005). The address
of documents might indicate the place of utterance. Indicating the place
of utterance is congruent with (but in the absence of stated addressees
does not completely fulfill) Vološinov's, rather than Saussure's, insistence
that a word obtains its meaning from its position in a dialogue between
speakers (Vološinov 1929/1986, 65-123). The possibility of exact phrase
searching on Google.com and the use of statistically improbable phrases
by Amazon.com corresponds to theoretical recognition of the distinc-
tiveness of content and the relative infrequency of occurrence of specific
sequences of more than one word. Searching in Google can exploit these
features; for Amazon.com, the features are presented as products of com-
putationally generated descriptions that demand contrasting distributions
and types of direct human mental labor for effective use. The need for and
