The search engine has become a part of our generation’s everyday life. Anytime some form of knowledge has escaped us, what do we do but Google it. It has a seemingly infinite and overlapping spectrum of realms of knowledge and information, but that is not why I chose it as my analogy. It is the very mechanism of how the search engine operates that is most like multiplicity. Search engines are the new encyclopedias; they are what Calvino called the “open” encyclopedias. The e-lit itself had an interactive search function that gave hierarchy to its content. But hierarchy in the new millennium is not linear, it is circular. It is literal
ly like a web. And in fact, the reason I became so insistent upon the operation of the search engine as my analogy for multiplicity is because, once I had researched how it works, I came to find that search engines use what is called a “Web crawler,” or in other cases it is known as a spider, that retrieves the information or knowledge we seek from the infinite and overlapping World Wide Web. The web is never complete, however, and that is why it is itself an “open” encyclopedia. Although I would posit that we no longer live in an encyclopedic world, but one of open databases. Whatever the case, with a search engine we have a common nucleus to which the spider weaves an infinite and interconnected web of knowledge.
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