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Location: II: Benveniste/Levi-Strauss
Discussion: Value and Unity on the World Wide Web
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kikeda |
Value and Unity on the World Wide Web
Feb 8 2007, 11:43 AM EST
I was thinking the other day about how linking on the world wide web works very much like Saussure’s concept of value. The Google rank, or value, of a page is determined by how many other pages link to it as well as the value of each of the linking pages. Thus, if a page with many links to it, but with links from sites with very few links to them themselves, it might not be ranked as high as a page with more select number of links that come from sites which are heavily linked to. Just like the relationship among signs, the linking among webpages is constantly changing as pages are created and destroyed. The Google rank is never static and pages continue to rise and fall on the web. Looking at the web in terms of Levi-Strauss’s idea of unity within the myth, which states, “[unity] is a phenomenon of the imagination, resulting from the attempt at interpretation; and its function is to endow the myth with synthetic form and to prevent its disintegration into a confusion of opposites” (5), unity within the web is also constructed in the imagination. Physically, the data behind all webpages is scattered across the globe on thousands of different servers. The semblance of unity that one gets from clicking back and forth between links only exists in virtual space. More than that, there is no one way to go through a website, no linear path, and that which we think of as a “home page” or “site entrance” may never be viewed if one can access the information one needs through a link. Do you find this valuable? |
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