Selection Power and Selection Labor - Human Information Retrieval - page 28

Box 2.1
(Continued)
Selection labor can be discovered in the lawspeaker's mental work of
memorization and recall, the communicative labor of recitation, and in
the attention of the auditors. There is no direct analogue to products of
description labor or metadata, further suggesting that these are historically
specific developments of written literacy.
Technology is manifested in a natural object adapted to a human pur-
pose, the rock face used as a sounding board for the voice of the law-
speaker:
All those things which labour merely separates from their immediate connection
with their environment are objects of labour spontaneously provided by nature,
such as fish caught and separated from their natural element, namely water, timber
felled in virgin forests, and ores extracted from their veins. (Marx 1867/1976, 284).
Therefore, selection power, selection labor, and technology are discernible
in a primarily oral information system and have persisted across written
literate and computational modes, indicating their centrality to informa-
tion retrieval.
system embodied in an individual. With increased social complexity and
the growth of both documents and indexes to documents, direct mental
labor in memory and recall is transferred to sources outside the human
body and mind— exosomatic resources. Variously conceived, the knowl-
edgeable person may remain significant to information seeking and offer
a readiness and focus of response difficult to obtain from more formal-
ized information systems. In a development concordant with other fea-
tures of secondary orality (Ong 1982), selection labor may be reemerging
as a single category, concentrated in searcher labor.
Although acknowledged as a form of labor, even if not subjectively
experienced as such, our primary concern will not focus directly on the
mental labor of memory, recall, and response, but rather on the techno-
logical forms that now absorb the cognitive burden of memory and recall
and also on the mental labor involved in their construction and searching.
In premodern practice (that is, written and printed forms distinguished
from computer-based, or modern systems), the organization of documen-
tary materials required physical labor and, most significantly, the distinc-
tion between description and search labor was relatively clear. We will