„Deep Search“ -The digital future of finding out

Konrad Becker 2008

How do things relate to each other? What is essential to one thing in
relation to another? How does subjective meaning and generalized or
objectified attributions of sense interrelate? What does it mean for our
sense of self- and how we relate to each other? What is meaning, how does it
develop? These questions have puzzled humankind for ages. In an era of
digital information, of human-machine interfaces and robotic data spiders,
surfing in the vast space of electronic data all on their own, they become
vastly relevant. Proteus, an early sea-god In Greek mythology, can foretell
the future. But he answers only to someone who is capable of capturing him
and changes his shape to avoid having to. More than ever, in a time of
information-explosion, it is not enough that data is useful but it needs to
be findable and accessible. Even though it can be quite hard to define the
difference between similar and dissimilar objects, it is yet significantly
more difficult for abstractions and ideas. However, finding information is
not the opposite of losing it but an active effort to recognize
interconnections in systems of meaning. Searching is an act of imagination,
an approximation of expected outcomes, where findings inscribe themselves
into the future.

Dragons of Chaos and Social Fiction

Earliest cultures had concepts of an ocean of information and a deep sea
monster dwelling in its dark expanse. The Black Winged Night of the Dragon
of Chaos, the "vast and dark void" of Tiamat, from whose dismembered body
the cosmos emerged and the world was formed. These demonic creatures mirror
anxieties associated with a space of chaotic and unstructured information,
untouched by the logo-centric rays of solar deities and the light of reason.
Adrift on the seas of knowledge, navigation is at the root of modern
sciences. Kybernos, the steersperson of the seafaring ancient Greeks,
maneuvering the nautical routes with the help of bright stars in the sky,
lent its name to the science of cybernetics. This discipline of control and
feedback, first applied in the field of ballistic course-plotting, stood at
the beginning of many present-day information and communication
technologies. Trying to produce intelligent maps of the world, these maps
often reveal more about their authors than the territory it describes.
Classification, elemental in mapping conceptual spaces of knowledge,
typically mistakes transient social fictions for real and physical
unchangeable facts. It happens time and again, particularly in relation to
race, gender, and social institutions and any other domains where there is a
vested interest in the making of realities.

Self-fulfilling Voodoo Categories

Names give advantage to those who know them, the ability to call forth, to
evoke or even to command the powers related to a name. Always there has been
an intimate relation between knowledge and control and it is a power to have
authority to name something. Problem solving involves a process of naming
things and issues and to frame the context to attend to them. To bring order
into the classes of names and hierarchies of designations is not only a
practical or formal scientific issue but a religious thing. Categorization
is type of cognitive voodoo related to deep rooted beliefs that the world is
enchanted by the spelling out of names and the universe can be influenced by
naming and ordering. And it can be – but not quite that simply. Luckily, to
create shared worldviews and to produce ideological conceptual fields is
more complex. Conjurers of classification, trying to force their hubristic
will unto the world, may underrate the forces at work in the mind of others.
They become victims of wishful thinking regarding the level of agreement
that can possibly be achieved. Fortunately, for a start, the world is not
necessarily compliant to voodoo categorization. Rigid standardization is
actually hard to come by in a world where research is an ongoing process
with changing definitions and a constant drift of understanding. It is a
meshed up reality of unexpected shifts in perspective and dynamic
interrelations with ever varying trajectories of power. To consent on a
standard there needs to be an agreement first and that can’t possibly happen
be where conformity does not exist. Nonetheless, expert "scientific”
classification can be used to advance an agenda, to create a reality that in
itself forms an effective case for a particular interpretation of reality.
Cataloging schemes are hardly the discovery of a true "natural order" but
authored, and the purpose is chosen not given. Categorization in a field of
knowledge doesn’t necessarily document a given reality but produces
knowledge in a particular interpretation of perception. Classification
systems are notoriously off track, but evidently good for the game of
self-fulfilling projections of ideological power.

All the Print that Fits, or Not

While ordering and structuring of knowledge has always been central to the
findability of past information, at least since the library of Alexandria, a
sorting concept like alphabetic order by author is a much more recent
fashion. Today’s dominant library classification system conserves the 19th
century worldviews of one Mr. Dewey and his limited grasp of realities
beyond a white protestant US middle class. The inventor of the Decimal
Classification System of books was fond of the metaphor of an army to
restore order in a chaotic mob of information, to impose a hierarchical
structure and to force ideas into military style organization charts. Melvyl
Dewey, was making bold assertions about the world when in 1876 he threw all
non-Christians into one single category, listed very last in all categories
about religion. Designers of the Soviet library’s catalog system produced
similar strong ideological statements about the world when they established
the top category "Works of the classical authors of Marxism-Leninism." This
demonstrates the problem of mapping catalogue systems onto one another, or
to match classification schemes – they each portray a different universe.
The US Library of Congress classification system, had to put a "former"
label in front of their Soviet Union Category, and still ranks a tiny
country like "Austria" or "Switzerland" on the same level of relevance as
continents like Africa and Asia. These funny distortion effects of reality
and relevance are also rooted in the need to find physical objects, books or
atlases on shelves. When the software of concept and classification meets
with the hardware of the tangible and the immaterial interacts with the
physical, it can produce unexpected results. Compared with smart automated
search and indexing-technologies, the traditional categorization systems
loose out in finding things in large digital resources. But obscured by
obsolete habits and outdated strategies from earlier efforts of structuring
knowledge, attempts at categorization of information and research resources
in the electronic realm can be highly inadequate. Digital information needs
no shelf and the question comes up if predefined categorizations are such a
good idea after all. A main reason for Google’s success was that there is no
virtual shelf, no awkward pre-constructed file system. But with shelf space,
even if it distorts the space of knowledge in curious ways, at least it is
easy to see if it’s full or empty.

Mentalist Catalogues and Fortune Cookies

Professional catalogue and categorization workers strive to avoid the
context-dependent and temporary at all cost, but always end up in the middle
of it. Trying to establish law and order in the information sphere some
warriors of categorization, seem oblivious to the nature of transient
realities and the fuzzy inflections of meaning. Catalogers‘ interests and
requirements necessarily dominate over more objective needs navigating the
complexity of the world. They breed cognitive management technologies blind
to cultural and subjective ambiguity and the slipperiness of
context-dependent statements. Ideas of an objective ordering of abstract
space are based on a religious notion of immaculate purity. They feed on
dangerous ideologies of cybernetic control that imagine the manifest world
to be reducibly to a single viewpoint. Language is a complex temporal and
spatial dynamic of signs and representation in relation to signified
objects. In general linguistics there are no positive terms, only
differences. Those working on categorization and building the ontology of
classification systems intended to provide stable continuation over time
have to organize the world ahead. Categorizing things in advance means to
forecast the future which is the magical practice of oracles, clairvoyant
seers or spiritist mediums. And it is exactly the traps of categorization
that mentalists and cold readers exploit in their illusionist stage shows.
Organizational schemes deteriorate with time and scale and the cost of
support for highly managed centralized large volumes soon becomes
prohibitive. Even though demand driven systems like Google are fortunate not
have to use advance predictions and projections of what one needs to know,
the massive scale of data remains to be a key technology challenge.

Modern Ghost Logic

For complex information systems it is essential that machines not only
respond and interact with humans but with each other. What are they talking
behind our back? Semantic computer networks run on ontologisms and first
order logic reducing logical inference down to simple rules. Syllogisms are
a form of logical argument described by Aristotle as "… certain things
being stated, something other follows of necessity from their being so." The
classic example is: Humans are mortal. Greeks are human. Therefore, Greeks
are mortal. This kind of Cartesian logic not only sounds stiff and
technical, but dealing in absurd absolutes leads to ridiculous conclusions.
Clay Shirky gives the following example: If – Count Dracula is a Vampire +
Count Dracula lives in Transylvania + Transylvania is a region of Romania +
Vampires are not real – the only logical conclusion from such a set of
statements is that Romania isn’t real. Sometimes the move from the logical
to the silly is closer than it appears. Computers are very well adjusted to
syllogisms but the world can’t be reduced to unambiguous statements that can
be effortlessly recombined. At the dawn of the 20th century, Sherlock Holmes
significantly propagated the suggestion that brilliantly smart people arrive
at unavoidable conclusions by connecting antecedent facts, "When you have
eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the
truth."
Holmes inventor Arthur Conan Doyle not only popularized the value of
deductive reasoning but was deeply engaged in fairy photography,
conversations with ghosts and a range of other spooky entities. Doyle is an
enthusiastic follower of late 19th century Spiritualism, a complex
socio-cultural adaptation to the advancements in science and new
technologies. Holmes is part of this response to a beginning modernity,
where the irrational and rational meet at the dawn of mass societies. The
cocaine driven pseudo-rationalism of logical deduction was a hysterical
reaction to an ambiguous world filled with libidinal ectoplasm and an
explosion of things from industrial scaled production machines. Painting
pictures of a simplified world in a narrowed down logic is soothing and
somewhat comforting. Unfortunately the unnerving daily reality – from
ancient times to high tech societies and urban angst – mostly involves
incomplete, inconclusive or uncertain and highly context-dependent
information. Machines are good at logical reasoning that works well in
places like index tables and this is where computer assisted automation is
largely useful and effective. Humans handle information based on "feelings",
popular heuristics, intuition, paranoia, wild speculations, and peer
pressure or group dynamics. People rely on imitation, tradition or
repetition and many other methods but rarely on syllogistic reasoning or
deductive logic.

Do Ideas Dream of Electric Sheep?

Understanding the term ontology from its philosophical origins it is the
study of entities and their relations in a systematic account of existence.
This tradition, less concerned with what is than with what is possible, asks
"What exists?" The object is a purely speculative purpose, not to facilitate
action but to advance understanding. Ontological implications of
categorization are highly problematic and ideas of "natural" classification
betray essentialism beneath an epistemological cover. Ontology, which is
about making clear and explicit statements about entities in a particular
domain, has variable definitions in itself. Computer sciences and the field
of digital knowledge management classification have taken the word
"ontology" to apply it to the problem of machine intelligible information
and an explicit specification of a conceptualization. Organizing collections
of entities, things or concepts, into related groups and hierarchical trees
is based on such categorization and classification. Philosophers like to
accuse each other of category errors, a semantic or ontological error. As in
"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" properties are ascribed to things
that supposedly could not have that property. Similarly it is seen as a
mistake to conceptualize the mind as an object of immaterial substance
because it appears meaningless for a dynamic set of dispositions and
capacity. Unfortunately there is no agreement on how to actually identify
category mistakes. Ontologisms call for domains with central and legitimate
authority, a confined stable corpus with limited entities and clear edges
suitable to formal categories. Strictly regulated realms of juridical
systems are an example. It requires participants to be highly trained
cataloguers, high levels of expertise and user coordination and
authoritative reference sources for decision making. Closed ontological
domains of hierarchic nature are typical for religious systems. Not only
psychotic personalities institutionalized or not, try to bring order into
the world by endless and bizarre lists or Byzantine systems of
classification in private cosmologies. But they are also the base for a
critical psychological discipline of controlled paranoia or analytical
methodologies in the vein of Cabbalist gymnastics of the mind. Furthermore
there is a long tradition of specialists for experimentally induced delirium
of interpretation and artificially produced individual delusions of
reference. This includes techniques of the cathartic shattering of
categories through the paradox and break up of false identifications in the
perplexities of Zen riddles.

Blind Taxonomies and Orders of the Imagination

Mnemonic devices and memory hooks do not work not because they are
objective. On the contrary, the ancient Ars Memoria applies narrative
structuring of the imagination and visual anchoring of information in the
geometry of thought. Typologies and taxonomies do not make assertions that
can be judged true or false but they are tools for organization and
stability of thoughts about a shared reality. Geekish dreams of an Ontology
of Everything aside, most proponents of semantic webs do seem sufficiently
aware that building a top-down ontology or taxonomy that works for everyone
and describes everything is not an option. They assert that this research
enables local communities of interest to create their own ontology – and is
not pursued for enforcement of a New World Order of authoritarian
classification. The reification of typologies is not unusual but building
taxonomies in the naïve belief that they represent the hierarchical
structure of reality can be considered as rather unenlightened. In the real
world of vast domains of proliferating entities that overlap in multiple
ways, unstable and without clear boundaries, ontological structuring does
not work well in broad access for non-expert users. The desired level of
consistency in a normative classification setting influences the balance
between complexity, simplification and scale. Either there is broad
agreement in a narrow band of users, or slight agreements in broad groups.

Stereotypes and the Exploitation of Subjectivity

Distributed use of tags in flat hierarchies enables a new heterogeneity with
large amounts of specific intelligence that improves organizational value
with scale and time. Triggered by users with similarities in classifying,
collaborative tagging may disproportionately reinforce each other’s views,
predisposition and foregone conclusions. Specialist blindness, enthusiastic
favoritism, tribal fads, gangland attitudes or stereotype prejudices can
develop a strong dynamic of skewing issues based on questionable validity of
judgment. But if tagging remains transparent, it allows preserving
individual, conflicting or even heretical and viewpoints without having to
force them into the straightjacket of temporal mainstream opinions. It
accommodates statistical distributions where frequently the infrequent
events make up a majority. The total volume of the long tail of events with
low popularity can exceed those with high popularity and Internet ventures
have leveraged this for their business. This outreach to the obscure and far
out, disconnecting the service model from the peak-idiocy blockbuster demand
curve from has certainly made media programming somewhat more intelligent.
It also contributes to the commercial exploitation of cultural niche markets
and marks the transition from the traditional disciplinarian modes of
preconfigured categories towards the new societies of control; from
educational indoctrination to the fluid mining of cognitive response and
reaction flows in opinion poll perception management. The so called web 2.0
interfaces enable the commoditization of subjectivity where social networks
are exploited and licensed back to the user.

Digital Eyes and the Hidden Gods

"The perfect search engine would be like the mind of God" Google co-founder
Sergey Brin once said. Accordingly digital search engines aim for maximum
reach and maximum recall. In the beginning is the search term but Google
wants to process all the information in the world and "understand exactly
what you mean". Without users there is no mind of God. Google has now become
the mainstream oracle of choice, the waves of zeitgeist queries breaking on
the rocks of solidified identities. A recent USC study of the "Center for
the Digital Future" found that a majority believes that "most or all of the
information produced by search engines is reliable and accurate."
Increasingly people rely on online resources for their routine intake of
daily news instead of traditional print newspaper. Clearly the issue of
ranking and the intrinsic ordering of information and the underlying
measuring and organization system prove to be a factor in forming
worldviews. Imagination, shaped by information we consume, in turn
predetermines what we are looking for. Google news is by now a classic
example of online news aggregation. Google’s ranking logics and indexing
methods result in exclusion and their news service hardly qualifies for
pluralism of viewpoints. Search results based on skewed but hidden mechanics
of classification lack in inclusiveness, fairness and scope of
representation. Their ranking practice is a trade secret and when suddenly
alternative information vanishes from top search results there is simply no
way of finding out why. It is a decentralized system, where all users become
transparent to deep marketing data-mining practices and motivational
research, but with an impenetrable center where at the core remains a hidden
god. While a corporation may run its server systems on open source software,
any political or economic influence remains hidden and the key providers of
search and retrieval technology are completely unaccountable to questions of
censorship and manipulation. In an age where access to information is
largely controlled by a few companies this is one of the most problematic
aspects of the search engines.

Playgrounds for Spooks

Search, data mining and information retrieval technologies are in high
demand by state or business intelligence agencies and spooks are on the
board of all major commercial operations. Technology that is indispensable
in security operations, risk management and for Command, Control,
Communications, Computing and Intelligence (C4I) systems. These technologies
can be used for humanitarian aims or rescue missions, but in an asymmetric
digital war on terror, information sorting and retrieval turn into virtual
or physical search and destroy operations. It is information paranoia and
data panic that haunts the crossroads of search technologies. It is a
playground for the total Information awareness officers and their panoptic
Eye of Providence. Search engine capabilities for an all seeing eye, massive
surveillance of personal information flows across digital networks. But the
liberty to engage in social, cultural and intellectual activities free from
oversight, in privacy and autonomy vanishes from sight.
Data mining and retrieval applications are developed in vastly expensive
software suites that are out of reach for civil society organizations,
independent researchers or critical initiatives. Powerful applications are
used as weapons against people by those who can afford it and are not
supported as tools for the public. Further evolvement of semantic technology
will enhance the uncanny ability to identify, understand and manipulate
individuals without their knowledge or awareness. In the name of diversity,
accessible and transparent applications are required and the cryptology of
open secrets must remain open source. A dynamic system of heterogeneous
multiplicity including peer-to-peer exchange interfaces and open source
search strategies, scalable personal information crawler and anonymous
engines are needed as well as decentralized cluster architectures without
central servers. Tools of cultural intelligence production should be in the
hands of the many and not the privilege of the few. A truly free market of
competing ideas requires access to the tools of computer aided analyzing and
inferring and democratic diversity of making sense means broad accessibility
of automated information processes.

Augmented Cyborg Cognition

Many experts see advancements in information processing move towards a
stronger human-computer symbiosis in a range of fields that include
bio-cybernetics and cognitive sciences. Human system integration is the
buzzword for new human/machine interfaces in speed and depth enhanced
information retrieval and decision making. Augmented Cognition wants to beat
human cognitive limitations through adaptive computation. An adaptive user
interface involves sensors for determining user state and emotions,
inference engines and classifiers to evaluate incoming sensor information.
Computational systems that continually adapt to their users and through
sensing, learning, and inferences understand trends, patterns, and
situations relevant to context and goals. Away from systems of linear or
static text and the electronic typewriter towards advanced statistical text
analytics, information mining and enhanced pattern recognition. Obviously
the jet fighter pilot is currently the prototypical cyborg. But both pilots
and the information workers on the ground have to filter relevant
information from vast amounts of data in no time and act on the results. It
appears only natural that DARPA is a leading player in a technology that
shapes the future of warfare and information dominance. Since any
sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, without a
practical understanding of how it operates, this emerging technology remains
a black art. Arcane sciences of high-powered and excessively funded labs set
out to influence information landscaping.

Embedded Information Politics

Futuristic applications and computational complexity aside, technologies of
the mind are political philosophy masked as neutral code. Deliberately
designed to yield results in a limited frame of reference, or naïve
mechanisms of ideologies in specific domains, cognitive tools are always
political. Also innocent utilities that blend into the routine of everyday
work and leisure, shading, blinding or subtly bending our perception in
various ways, weave cognitive threads into the fabric of reality.
Classification is not merely a retrieval tool, but also an embedded element
of the ongoing construction of a work context and the associated dynamic
processes and mechanisms. Logic of everyday language and political rhetoric
typically evolve from a hierarchy of semantic objects where its assumptions
are presented as god-given and "natural". But in the daily reality of info
overflow it is imperative to acknowledge both arbitrariness and willful
designation, and that hierarchies are not miraculously produced by nature
itself. What is at stake is nothing less than the informational constitution
of societies and their institutions. Throughout the heterogeneous fields of
search research and the formation of applied sciences at the foundations of
a democratic public, cultural intelligence is the thread to look for.