I tend to think of the Internet as a place, rather than a collection of documents or pages. When I click links, I do not simply sit back and watch moving pixels on my iMac's glowing LCD. I actually feel movement in my feet - soles pressed into the floor, tendons stretched and ready. Tactual hallucination? Sometimes, I flex my calves tight, lift my heels, as if balancing on tip-toe, standing tall to look out over a vast expanse. I wander, get lost, and find myself again. In my mind, it is no coincidence that we use the word site to draw boundaries between places on the web, dragging our metaphorical sticks through the sand.
Site has many meanings. In architecture and urban planning, it is the place where a structure (or structures) was, is, or will be located. In history and casual conversation, it is the setting where something happened or happens. A civil war site. (I love also how this sounds like cite, as in to cite a source, which really just means locating information for future readers, leading them to the place you found it).
Yesterday, I stumbled across a 1999 interview with Jeff Bezos while doing research for a freelance gig. As I read, I realized I was no longer occupying a place. I was surveying it. Or maybe, I was reading a historical document. I checked the URL to make sure it was really PBS.org, verified the date, and looked for author credits. I was authenticating and contextualizing the words - the analytic processes of historical and archeological research.
PAUL SOLMAN: What is this?
JEFFREY BEZOS, CEO, AMAZON.COM: This is my World Trade Center escape kit. It's a --
PAUL SOLMAN: World Trade Center escape kit?
JEFFREY BEZOS: -- a flashlight and, you know, a honking Swiss Army knife. It even has pliers.
PAUL SOLMAN: He keeps it on hand because when New York's World Trade Center was bombed a few years ago, folks were stuck in the elevators.
JEFFREY BEZOS: And it turned out if you'd had this simple tool you could have carved your way out of those elevators.
PAUL SOLMAN: Carved your way out of the elevators?
JEFFREY BEZOS: Yes. No Problem. So I got my whole family these World Trade Center escape kits.
These words gave me chills. Here was an artifact jostled out of its soil layer, eerily juxtaposed with the post 9/11 world. I had never felt quite like this while reading a web page. Had the illusion of place been destroyed? Was the web just a collection of documents after all? Digital artifacts? Relics?
Was every page an elegy?
But no place is ever so simple. No place exists as only one kind of site. The World Trade Center is a perfect example - a site where towers once stood, but also historic, a place where something happened. It is textual, too - not only because it was written into history, but also in its own right. Architecture and visual art speak specific languages. Like journalism and creative writing, these languages exist within (or against) a formal, cultural, and historical tradition. You can read the buildings for meaning, and you can read their collapse, too. All of this is part of the site.
Perhaps this complexity is what best defines a place - not its tactual, physical existence or political boundaries. When I surf the web, I can stand on tip-toe for real.
Comments (2)
Chewy post. I haven't thought consciously about this, but I (and probably everyone else as well) make a distinction between live and dead sites. Sometimes I look at the date first... just to see if it is still a living document.
But just because Hamlet is hundreds of years old doesn't invalidate or diminish it, right?
I guess this is why I emphasize the dates on my home page, but not on my articles... I don't want to give the impression that just because I wrote something last year, that it is has no worth. (The content will prove or disprove that all by itself).
Still chewing ... Thanks.
Posted by Howard Abrams | January 30, 2004 9:49 AM
Posted on January 30, 2004 09:49
I have been fascinated with this topic for some time. In the most Judeo-Christian line of questioning, as if a six year old, I wonder: Where do Web sites go when they die?
I imagine the Internet is a symbol of our temporality. Its as if we need professional cyber morticians to cut off those dead sites from the rest of the living. No one regulates this massive body of knowledge, which is liberating and frightening from a news perspective. For example there is no gatekeeper, no news agency, no news desk editor sitting listening to the Doppler and leaning over the wire .telling us what to fear most. Perhaps we need Internet environmentalists who advocate cleaning up the HTML waste, the abandoned sites, the relics of a previous self, a dream diminished .
Right now Im sure someones handheld cell phones wireless Internet is searching for a packet of information, which is zinging past by head, probably colliding with my grumbling stomach, bouncing off a satellite, hitting someones salad in New York, and landing at its destination in Princeton. And yet the information, more often than not, makes it to its correct destination on time. This process fascinates me
Good post, Karrie....
Posted by Tricia Louvar | January 30, 2004 12:26 PM
Posted on January 30, 2004 12:26