Information Technology Reference
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writing, erasing, and substituting symbols. Selection operates on data and
inevitably encounters semantics and syntax—meanings and patterns—of
that data or medium. Thus, both semantics and syntax are also inescapa-
ble. When the selection medium is written language, semantics undergoes
a further translation into a more specific concern regarding production of
meaning from written language and syntax becomes issues surrounding
the replication and difference of words and sequences of words. These
inescapable elements do not simply coexist but engage dialectically: com-
putational procedures for selection that correspond to modernity interact
with the production of meaning and patterns of replication and difference
that embody strong inheritances from orality and from written literacy, or
premodernity.
The dialectical interaction of computational procedures for selec-
tion with the semantics and syntax of written language—understood as
patterns—is most fully and directly realized in Internet search engines,
although more in practice than in consciousness or theory. The most dis-
tinctive, novel, and strongly emerging aspects of Internet search engines
is not full-text retrieval itself—consider Biblical concordances—or the
underlying processes that support selection, but rather the scope and
extent of data covered, with variety merging into global heterogene-
ity. Enabled by the transfer of description process from direct human
labor to machine and also by the reduced constraints of machine stor-
age limitations, a quantitative change yields qualitative effects. In addi-
tion, search engines may be approaching a teleological state or plateau
and may embody the possibilities approached by other systems. Systems
that employ semantic description labor directly, and humanly, encounter
patterns of production of meaning from written language, along with a
subsequent dialectic between the descriptions and computational proce-
dures for selection. Therefore, inescapable elements transcend the divide
between the library and information and Internet cultures, although they
occur differentially in the more novel, interesting, and possibly histori-
cally inevitable occurrences embodied in Internet search engines.
Contingent and Inescapable Elements
By separating the inescapable from the variable or contingent, we can
now progressively isolate the set of activities that should form the focus
for our prospective attention. For analytical purposes, we begin by
