KEMBLE, ONTARIO—We all go home. It is a return that can be couched in obligation, satiation, relaxation and a myriad of divergent emotions. But it is also done because of familiarity. We go back because it is a physical and emotional gesture that has worn a groove into our minds so vast it is impossible not to fall into it. It is impossible to erase the groove but with motivation and years of effort it can be flattened out and made more avoidable. It’s like sucking your thumb. Even though I quit twenty years ago to avoid social castigation, when I try it now it feels normal. Like home.
Historically, our home on the Internet has been a homepage. From 1996 until 2005 my homepage was a site called lynx mindex. I used it because it was an aggregation of categorized search boxes giving me instant access to every form of search. From dictionary to versiontracker and travelocity to boingboing. Eventually Google supplanted the entire directory because it outperformed niche searches. But I kept using my old homepage until it went offline—because of the groove in my mind it had worn.
Search is home for all of us now. Google has harnessed our home, or our combined network effects, and deepening the groove in our minds and reproducing the ecology of our search/home system.
In other words, search is the Internet operation system. It is not, as Michael Arrington of TechCrunch has written, a war between economic behemoths for monopoly, but a battle that is now over. The grooves, fraught with material and emotional tensions, are carved deeply. These battles are not black and white but rather cultural iterations which simultaneously wear and flatten grooves peacemeal over time. Our cultural legacy is to read into these immeasurable morasses of cultural shiftings a simplicity that provides the comfort of power and continued control of meaning to historically sanctioned groups—privileged white Western people.
So we make blog posts.
It is gratifying to simplify our cultural moment and project my mirror image into the future because I am a princess of search today and no matter what, I can never entirely forget it.
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