Teen Image

<p><strong>1. Ritualized Unknowing</strong></p> <p>People keep trying to get a handle on what’s happening. There’s a fear that others are hastening to make startling connections among the raw material, tracing lines between points we didn’t even know existed. Exacerbating this anxiety is the fact that despite its supposed insistence on the consolidation of knowledge and the worth of information, the Internet produces ritualized unknowing. You could say, however, that this is a good thing, for it provokes a desire to remystify the frenzy of technological change through ritual, through a personal and allegorical rehearsal of what is perceived to be a manic and distorting increase in density, a compression exponentially telescoping in reach and magnitude.</p> <p>To tame this frenzy we are offered the calming linearity of lists. While the persistence of the list as a constraint on the Internet’s data-cloud may simply be due to the persistence of small rectangular monitors, the list is clearly one of the chief organizational principles of the Internet. Search engines return lists; news is funneled into aggregations of that which is most flagged or emailed; blogs garnish their teetering stacks with the latest entries; a web page itself typically extends downward in a scrolling, implied list…</p>