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theory on demand
of a strong interaction between the members of that network. If one feels to be in agreement with that community, one could then consider the information relevant, or one could also dismiss it in favor of other trusted networks. Following this approach, and if Google was to be prepared to disclose publicly its decision-making mechanism, and if Internet users were to be able to understand that much, then the objective vs. subjective issue could easily be set aside. One would not only be able to empathize step by step, search after search, with the network that would please us most, but he would also be able to directly influence it, by keeping it within our tastes and preferences, our ideas, and our idiosyncrasies - or in short: in accordance with who we are. 7.3 Public Sphere and Private Sphere PageRank[TM] illustrates another dichotomy: the one between the public and the private sphere. In effect, everything that passes through Google is made public: who didn’t find private e-mails amidst the ranking’s returns, maybe because they were send by error to a public mailing list? Now that an ever increasing mass of personal information transits through Google - and IT carriers in general - the possibility of one’s phone calls (channeled through VoIP for instance) being archived and made retrievable by way of a search engines no longer appears so distant. It could be argued that technology also manages to ‘hybridize’ the public and private sphere: and anyway, to connect to the Internet means to open up to the world, and once we have opened up, it is the world that opens itself up to our lives. There are already networks that maintain practices, which destroy any illusion of objective information. They decide themselves, in a deliberate, precise, and totally subjective way, what they want to make public and what they wish to keep private. This phenomenon takes its full signification when a search engine turns out to be unable to honor a query of which the specified quality is greater than the qualitative availability and proposed technical infrastructure. The best-known example is peer-to-peer network search (P2P),34 which can be accessed with softwares like ‘eMule’ and torrent clients among others. The mass of data that can be searched in these networks corresponds to the data shared by the users it changes in an irregular fashion over time, and this is why such networks are described as ‘transient’.35 Transient, because a user is free to classify any material she puts in the system as either public or restricted to the private
34. P2P literally means ‘peer-to-peer’. It is a mode o of communication whereby all parties have the same functionality and each can initiate the communication process. It is radically different from other models such as server/client or master/slave. P2p is often implemented by offering to each node both server and client capabilities. In other words, Peer-to-peer applications allow users to directly exchange files over the Internet. More specifically, p2p is a ‘transient’ network that allows a group of people using the same application to connect and gain direct access directly to shared resources. 35. The term ‘transient’ derives from astrophysics and from acoustics and refers to a source whose radiation varies over time in a random manner. ‘Transient’ networks are temporary from the point of view of their informational flows; in the case of p2p networks their ‘transient’ character depends on the variation of the amount of information each individual shares.