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excluding highly variable elements: human description labor and prac-
tices that depend on the presence of the products of human description
labor (including exerting generic capacity and certain forms of order-
ing) from the library and information sphere, and semantic search labor
adapted to description, syntactically produced generic capacity, and the
orderings of records from the Internet sphere. We can still include one
slightly variable element, Boolean logic for selection, while recognizing
the possibility of other computational selection procedures and also rec-
ognizing that the critical factor is abstraction of the segment of utterance
from the line of writing, not Boolean logic itself. We can then focus our
attention on the interaction of the inescapable elements; Internet search
engines currently offer the fullest and possibly teleological realization of
that interaction. Table 5.3 summarizes the argument's progression and
indicates the focus of subsequent attention, where “+” indicates strongly
present, “-” indicates largely absent, and “+ / -” indicates both presence
and absence in significant but not necessarily comparable proportions
within the practices of that culture. The inescapable elements themselves
are poorly understood and require theoretical understanding, which to
date partially tends to focus on the variable practices. Studying the ines-
capable, in its fullest realization, also may reveal the particular forms of
value derived from the variable elements analytically excluded.
The significance of the particular inescapable elements identified can
be strongly supported by analogies to orality emerging into literacy and
a contrast with written literacy, or premodernity, as a dual triangulation
effect.
Under orality emerging into literacy, selection labor concentrated pri-
marily in memorization and communication of a linear spoken utter-
ance, and selection power emerged as dialogue between human speakers.
The primary analogy of orality emerging into literacy with modernity is
that the entire linear utterance—now written rather than spoken—and
the human labor embodied in it is potentially available for exploitation.
Although the real possibilities of direct comprehension are constrained by
the extent of available utterances, a compensating addition of computa-
tional procedures for selection has developed. However, those procedures
involve tearing the word or other segment of utterance from its place in a
linear utterance. The absence from modernity of an immediately human
respondent in dialogue can be partially compensated for by the dialogic
