Generators Or:

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Internet

“All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard overheard. What else? Use of scissors renders the process explicit and subject to extension and variation.”

William Burroughs (1963)

“Perhaps not surprisingly, our "new" media literacies echo rather old strategies for manipulating information. Just as Sir John Gibson cut and copied passages, notes and references into notebook, we tumble and tweet the flood of net ephemera that washes over our screens, cutting and pasting found materials into webforms housed on servers we'll likely never see.”

Whittney Trettien (2009)

“Google is not the zeitgeist, nor is it an indifferent and all inclusive database of it. Google, as a generator, is a corporate algorithm that ranks webpage relevancy (from a limited cross-section — i.e. what it bothers to index — of an already limited segment of the zeitgeist — i.e. Internet users and web content) based on its own idiosyncratic definition of 'relevancy' and, in tandem with corporate web designers, manipulation of the results.”

Dan Hoy (2006)