How does Google mean?...or: "Everything and More"

No, I'm not going to weigh in on Google's (lack of) aesthetic sense, as demonstrated by the search engine's widely panned and short-lived experiment on Thursday during which a large photograph took the place of the usual plain, white background. Because who cares, really.

No, I'm much more interested in pointing out something that I've noticed over the past month or so that appears to the left of the results of an ordinary Google search. Here's a photo I snapped of it:

Anyone?

What immediately comes to my mind, whenever I glance at this side-bar (which I've done many times) is the title of the only published piece of writing by the late David Foster Wallace that I was never able to make it all the way to the end of. I refer to 2003's Everything and More, subtitled: A Compact History of Infinity. This book-length essay, intended (naively) for the general reading public, was Wallace's audacious, gimmicky and controversial attempt to explain set theory ("multiple infinities")—created (or maybe 'discovered'?) by the 19th century German mathematician Georg Cantor—without really using any actual math.

But, more than Wallace's book, it just strikes me that the words and hyperlinks featured in the above snapshot amount to a kind of smart-ass collage or accidental poem. In other words, with your initial search, Google is providing you with "everything." Should "everything" fail to sate your appetite for page upon page of relevant* material, follow the hyperlink, for Google offers you still "more" than mere infinity.

I guess I'm really just thinking about a constellation of things. First, the fact that we don't often talk about Web pages in ways that take account of how arrangements of words, images and—for example—navigational functions impact conveyed meaning. This can encompass both "intentional" and "unintentional" meanings; it can refer to the ways in which words, images and hyperlinks function as collages of juxtapositions, oppositions and organizational schemes. Furthermore, meaning is impacted not only by what exists on the Web page but by what is left out. Finally, meaning is shaped by the sets of expectations that users bring to bear when using a Web page. This is particularly interesting in reference to search engines, in the case of which the user's attention is almost always focused upon the expectation that he or she will encounter immediately thereafter a spectrum of (categories of?) content.

And, of course, there's the Marshall McLuhan-esque question: what, after all, do I mean when I refer to the "content" with which we expect a search engine to "connect" us?

All right. Hope that makes some kind of sense. Time for bed.

ADDENDUM:
It occurs to me that there's significance as regards user-expectations to be attached to the basic function of a search engine: (i) the sheer act of typing words into Google's interface signifies the expectation/intention of obtaining information, data or some other kind of non-tangible artifact, whose 'form' and to some extent, 'content', must be fixed or predictable to you—otherwise (i.e., were results to provide inscrutable artifacts or incomprehensible information), how could you anticipate that the results might have any value to you?; and (ii) usually, the object or objects of a search are characterized simultaneously and to an equal degree by a basic lack of familiarity—otherwise, why would you need to "search" for it in the first place?

In both i and ii are to be found the complicated interplay of contradictions between 'form' and 'content', as well as between anticipated familiarity and anticipated unfamiliarity. In an Internet search, one's capacity to comprehend and derive use from unfamiliar content is conditioned by one's reasonable expectation of familiarity of form.

(Here are some more quotations and aphorisms from the late, great Marshall McLuhan, some of which deal with the form/content dyad.)

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* In the sense of popular and of containing such keywords as are to be found on a given Web location, irrespective of things like context and other 'meaning'-derived metrics.

GeoCities will be gone forever as of Monday, October 26.

Sometimes my capacity for nostalgia surprises me. That's because I lie to myself, and the lie that I tell myself is that I'm not nostalgic. The impulse to tell that lie must be machismo, inscribed in my male DNA. Nostalgia seems soppy, feminine (or maybe too Irish?) and scatter-brained: A sign of physical and mental weakness.

See? I'm already babbling incoherently.

For people my age and possibly for other people the decade of the 1990s triggers our nostalgia reflex like no other. It seems like it was such an innocent and simple time. Only we Americans, who live in a condition of total culture industry-immersion, could possibly be self-indulgent enough to cast matters in that light.

Really, it wasn't a time of innocence at all, but rather, of myopia and wealth. If the myopia was the kind of myopia that accompanies great wealth, the wealth was the kind of wealth -- think "Dot-Com Bubble" -- that depended upon myopia for its sustenance: irrational exuberance, half-baked math and coke-addled entrepreneurs gaming venture capitalists for millions of dollars in order to get chihuahua-enthusiasts.com off the ground.

But then again, it was an innocent and simple time, and maybe its innocence was partly to do with its simplicity. To be sure, the Reagan 80s were an even simpler time that bombarded us to an unprecedented degree with big spectacles of consumer populism, products, images and myths that knew no class divisions, preferring to treat us all like idiots: the Magic Of Spielberg® ™, Family Ties, Reagan's "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" shit, NASA, Eddie Murphy, when he got really really lame, New Coke, Sylvester Stallone, Flight of the Navigator, etc., etc.

No wonder everybody was in such a celebratory mood in the 1990s. By the end of the 80s, culture had basically gotten as bad as it could possibly get. So it was time for Big Capital to steal, to gut, to bastardize and to...erm...monetize* a fresh batch of attitudes, fashions and tropes. Remember My So-Called Life? And, uh, 120 Minutes (actually begun in the 80s, but whatever...). The "Seattle sound" stuff was kind of refreshing for a couple of seconds to those of us teenagers who hadn't previously been cool enough to know about Fugazi, The Minutemen and Big Black. And before long, we had amazing music to get into, like Stereolab (rest in peace, Mary Hansen), Lush, Gastr del Sol, Jim O'Rourke, Pavement and -- last but not least -- Oasis.

But I'll leave aside my sure-to-be-interminable observations about music for another day. the important thing to observe for now is that through the vast majority of that halcyon decade, that obnoxious "Pitchfork" bullshit had yet to rear its head and poison everything with its vile, vapid, retrograde shittiness.

No, in those days, the decade of Bill Clinton, we had GeoCities.

And the point of this post is to inform those of you who may not already know it that GeoCities -- the Yahoo corporation's once-ubiquitous, trusty, colorful, untrendy, gauche, un-ironic, un-self-reflexive, fun, free Web site-hosting service -- will be closing in just a couple of short days.

I'm going to miss GeoCities. Just having it around. It's been around for over 15 years! For some reason, it honestly just feels weird to contemplate a world without tons of decrepit old GeoCities Web pages that nobody ever looks at anymore. Isn't it in repositories such as this that is to be found proof of (the decline of) Western civilization?

Read Yahoo's lame non-reasons for euthanizing GeoCities. (I'll get over it. Some day....)

And click here or the image below to learn -- at this, the eleventh hour -- how to help the venerable Web site archive.org to save archives of your favorite GeoCities sites as a service to history and to humanity. In twenty years, when you write your two-volume History of the Internet, you'll thank yourself for having had the prescience to ensure the preservation of a deserving GeoCities site.

Am I the only one who's going to miss GeoCities?

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* I feel like I should say ten Hail Marys or something for having used that phrase, even in jest... You can take the Catholic out of the Church, but you can't etc., etc. Turns out this is true even when he takes himself out of the Church, crying tears of joy and toasting to his imminent liberation from his oppressors every step of the way.

Jukebox AdventuresA guest post, contributed by Paddy.

I just moved to the area. It has the reputation for being progressive and features at least one century-old dive bar on every square block. Last Saturday, I decided to make the rounds. After all, some of these watering-holes were likely to become my second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh homes. I kind of made it an all day thing, and it was going quite well.

Later on, I had invited a friend to join me and we stumbled in to a particular bar. It was a lot like the others: small, with a pool table taking up half the room, and oozing with character. Like all the others, it had a jukebox. One of those Internet jukeboxes, in which if you pay more, you get access to the big database.

I was feeling quite good, and decided to put in $5 worth of all jazz songs. Now, I fully understand the implications of this. But it was my dime, and jazz is what I wanted to hear. Aware that there are certain responsibilities that come with picking jukebox songs, I was conscientious enough to pick some jazz tunes that I deemed universal enough to maybe pass muster at this homey, neighborhood bar. Hummable and bluesy ones; one or two patrons may even recognize them. I picked like three Kind of Blue cuts including "So What" and "All Blues." I think I slipped in a more accessible Coltrane tune like "Impressions," and I remember going for at least one bluesy Mingus tune. If anything, the music would be harmless.

Preceded by a couple of Bon Jovi songs, my picks came on. Seated at the table next to ours were five or so guys, and immediately, a quiet and steady din emanated from them, as Paul Chambers punched out the bass intro to "So What." I could sense a touch of passive panic, like something was wrong. As Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley were getting knee deep in their sax solos, the rumblings grew steadily more intense.

The next Kind of Blue tune came on and the barometric pressure in the room rose as that table next to us nervously twitched. When my third song came on, someone said, quite loudly: "more jazz?" The entire table then simultaneously launched into a conversation with each other about "what is this bullshit?" and "what the hell is this shit?" and "who put this on?" Now, I am not sure if they made the connection that I was the one who put this shit on, but they continued to berate the picks for the next five minutes. Even the bartender whom had earlier served us our beers came over to that table and joined in with a couple of "what the fuck"s and laughed.

I got pissed off about this strange and open hostility, so, I finished my beer quickly, said "let's go" to my bewildered friend, and we left.

Okay, so I picked a shitload of jazz tunes and jazz tunes have the tendency of being over four and half minutes long and apparently not everybody likes even greatest hits bebop, BUT, a few things:

1. I paid for the songs
2. The bartender cost the bar a potential frequently drinking customer who would have probably stopped in at least monthly.
3. What? You can't take it? You can't function in the bar without hearing the sound of a flying-V guitar? You can only survive from chorus to sing-along chorus? We all have to put up with jukebox picks we don't like, but deal with it. Try talking. This strange hostility is not cool.

Anyhow, we went a bar on the same block called The Squirrel Cage, where I didn't put any jazz tunes on the jukebox, but I played pool, talked, and had a good time.