I very much enjoyed reading Kris Cohen’s “Search Engine Subjectivities.” Not only was it extremely useful in helping Kelly and I think through our Makey Makey project, it’s also pushing my thinking on the idea of the “database,” something I’ve been interested in since we read Manovich (and also a concept I’m trying to incorporate into my paper tomorrow for the Visual Culture Symposium – so wish me luck with that).

Both Cohen and Manovich seem to be asking a similar question: where can we find evidence of humanity/personhood in the database/search engine? As Todd mentioned in his blog (from quite a while ago), Manovich suggests “mediation between the [human-computer] interface is increasingly blurry.” Manovich pits the technology of the database against “another form that has traditionally dominated human culture – narrative” (218). For Manovich, “narrative” is no longer adequate to make sense of the massive amounts of (seemingly) unstructured information the database offers. Yet he claims, “it is also appropriate that we would want to develop a poetics, aesthetics, and ethics of this database” (219). In other words, there is still a role for humanity in the organization of information. He calls for new kinds of narratives in the form of “‘info-aesthetics’ – a theoretical analysis of the aesthetics of information access as well as the creation of new media objects that ‘aestheticize’ information processing” (217).

I think Cohen would agree that a project like Beacon does indeed “‘aestheticize’ information processing.” But his next question is something along the lines of, so what? Cohen points out that Beacon does not inherently mess with or interrupt the search engine – the means by which we access the database. In fact, it demonstrates both its perpetuity and unavoidability. Cohen is also invested in what this suggests about relationality (in addition to what Beacon says about aesthetics). But both lines of thinking reveal something important about what Manovich was also dealing with – the role of the human.

As Cohen mentions, when we watch Beacon, we feel a little like voyeurs; we know there are real people typing in the commands that flash across the screen, and at times we feel like we’re being let in on some pretty intimate secrets/desires. But Cohen questions what exactly a “real” person is. Human subjectivity, he argues, has been fundamentally altered by the existence of technology. Below are just some of the ways our consciousness has been impacted by the search engine:

1) “Search engines offer access to the feeling that it would be possible to find anything” (13)

2) “Search engines grant this kind of access by re-wiring curiosity and the circuits curiosity can travel” (15)

3) “We also know that search engines ‘see’ in this way because, ultimately, they need to serve us back to ourselves in the form of ads, sponsored links, and personalized encounters” (24)

Additionally, the database we access is not nearly as unstructured as Manovich imagines it was in 2001. Rather, data is organized as a means of control, as a system of “non-intentional, non-conscious algorithmic processes that remake us as data points in populations and that feed the results of these biopolitical processes back to us as results” (47). While Manovich finds possibility in “info-aesthetics,” the encounter between the database and the narrative, Cohen finds possibility in “parallelism,” the intersection of populations and publics. It’s clear that Cohen thinks of populations as the sort of de-humanized search results we’re fed back through the computer, however I’d be curious to hear Cohen’s account of “publics” and where/how/why they diverge from the algorithm.