Written by: Yuya Takeda, Kedrick James, Rachel Horst, Esteban Morales (University of British Columbia)

Abstract: This paper is born out of conceptual work stimulated in the construction of a literary search engine for the PhoneMe project (www.phonemeproject.com), social media for spoken-word poetry. Drawing on Hiroki Azuma, we explore the ways in which desires are located and consummated through acts of searching and propose a pedagogy of search literacy which embraces spontaneity and accidents to break out of the algorithmic guidance. Azuma sees the postmodern as an historical period characterized by a shift away from grand narratives to database culture, whereby information is consumed not as a cohesive unit stabilized by collectivized narratives, but as a protean association of data fragments made available through searching databases. Such a cultural shift not only transforms the media, but also subjectivity. We propose a theory based on the idea of inadvertent semiosis we call anti-signs. In the database environment, these anti-signs are aggregated to produce the consumers’ Antibody. This Antibody, or one’s algorithmic guide, begins to direct the user’s desires and attentions. We present a way to bring contingency back into the act of searching through prompting glitches to occur–what Azuma calls misdelivery–and through the aesthetic (as opposed to efferent) textual representation of literary search results.

Keywords: Hiroki Azuma, search engines, subjectification, database