Ranking (part 3): Lists and rankings as an undervalued dimension of the Internet

The British media theorist and sociologist Adrian McKenzie has recently sketched out his idea about the Internet as a medium of lists. I found his talk on a workshop at Goldsmiths highly inspiring. It struck me that rankings in particular, and lists in general are indeed one of the major structuring principles of the Internet. As soon as you look for lists and rankings, you find them everywhere: Google’s search results, YouTube’s rankings, Wikipedia’s lists of alternative meanings, online gaming results, menus and drop down menus, mailing lists, discussion lists and bulletin boards, internet archives, link lists, tag lists and bookmark lists, contact and address lists, lists of friends on social networking sites, rankings of personal tastes (such as my favourite films), collided lists of taste such as Metacritic.com, and specialised ranking portals such as http://ranqit.com/… Rankings and lists, wherever you look.

This means: Lists are probably the most prominent form of representation on the Internet. And I am not talking here about “mere representation”. Think of Google’s power, and you know: Lists have consequences. In fact, there is a case to make that lists are influential on deeper levels as well. Much computer code is organised in lists of some sorts: sequences of statements, which are machine-, and often also human-readable (not for me, though). Computer memory, I am told, is organised by lists, where to find what (and much of the processing power on a personal computer is used for search on these lists). Metadata is usually organised in ontologies, which are in turns organised as hierarchical trees, and such trees are in fact nothing else then multi-levelled lists. Most metadata takes the form of lists.

In the recent 20 years of Internet theory, the concepts of list and ranking never got the attention they deserved. As soon as you get obsessed about the question of lists and rankings, you can read much media theory in a new light. Lev Manovich, for example, puts in his “Language of new Media” (2001) the database at the centre of his approach. In this context, he briefly writes about hierarchical and object-oriented database structures. According to him, hierarchical databases have tree-like structures and object-oriented databases “are organised in hierarchical classes that may inherit properties from higher classes in the chain” (p 228). As I will argue later, both forms of databases are in fact complex arrangements of lists. Manovich does not follow this lead. He is interested in the relationship of database and narrative (and argues that in new media, narratives become one special form of database). But in fact much of what he says has an even deeper root in the origins of most databases in the notion of list.

It is thus an interesting move that Matt Fuller included in his alphabetically arranged (!) anthology “Software studies" (2008) an article about “Lists". Here, Alison Adam traces the origins of lists back to the origins of writing: “Arguably, it is the business of recording lists, which marks our literate societies form pre-literate societies” (p. 174). For Adam, lists have a double character. On the one hand, they can be “a way of sanitizing and simplifying knowledge” (p. 175). No wonder, that we can describe not only the origins of modern bureaucracy, but also of modern science as an application of lists on a huge scale: “Through lists we order and control ourselves and the world we inhabit”. On the other hand, Adam points the out the principal openness of lists: Almost always we can add further elements, and a list “doesn’t have to impose a single mode of ordering”. It seems as if for Adam the first side of lists is bad, the second good, even though she does not say so explicitly: “The elasticity of the list, its capacity to surprise, means that LISP (a programming language based on lists - gb) resists the obvious Taylorisation that one might expect with such a powerful ordering tool" (p 177).

Adam’s article opens up a rich tradition of theorising lists in philosophy and sociology: From Foucault and Latour to Bowker/Star and Law/Mol. Even more surprising that these traditions seem to not have led to a theory of the internet as a medium of lists. Maybe it is exactly the old age of lists, which let us overlook their central role on the Internet: Lists were there since the origins of writing, and maybe even before, so why should we theorise them now? Closely related to this is a second reason: We were so impressed by the fact that the Internet is from a technical perspective a network that we looked mainly for network structures (and this, of course, had to be the first approach). A third reason can be found in the vague political implications of concepts such as lists or networks. "Network" sounds horizontal, democratic, open, participatory, even though this is not anymore the case, as soon as you take a closer look at them. List and rankings, in opposite, have a hierarchical taste. They are somehow linear, almost square, not as fuzzy and chaotic as networks. (Adam develops a more complex idea of lists, but she also relates their ability to control and order with bad, and their openness and elasticity with good, which is, I would argue, a rather simplistic view of a very complex relationship).

You can find such vague political implications in many forms. Not all are based in critical research. An annoying example for an apologetic version is the naïve form of Internet euphoria under the slogan “Web 2.0”. This aged buzzword collides a range of different internet phenomena (blogs, wikipedia, video communities, tags, social bookmarking, social networks, and so on), thinks them through under the paradigm of (social) networking, and values them as democratic, participatory, etc, which leads, of course, to some big mistakes. I am deeply convinced: Social networking should not be the paradigm for the rest of the Internet. I would argue that most phenomena cannot and should not be understood under this paradigm. And Nico Nico Douga is its most spectacular example.

But you also find such vague political implications in such forms of critique as Geert Lovink’s, who rightly so questions the concept web 2.0. In an interview, which he gave Die Zeit in 2007 to promote his book “Zero comments”, Lovink mentions the blogger’s obsession with rankings and lists, and finds this rather depressing. Rankings and lists have become, according to him, a technical mirror: We prove that we exist via Google. We exist through statistics. The concept of lists and ranking serves him to undermine the naïve web 2.0 discourse: Because web 2.0-ish applications are in reality based on rankings, they are not as democratic as they think they are. And yes, web 2.0 should be critiqued in this way, and lists and rankings should and can be means and objects of such critique. But just as networks are in itself nothing good, lists are in itself nothing bad. They are one form, how elements can relate to each other. And they can have a productive role, just as networks have. This includes their ability to order and simplify just as their openness.

When you look at Nico Nico Douga, you can learn about other functions of lists and ranking. Lists and ranking are, for example, one of the ways, how temporality is organised on the Internet. They are at the centre of the Internet’s public sphere. For me, they are one central corner stone for a theory of liveness, which I am working on these days (I hope to post more about this at some point here on this blog). If you look at the Internet as a medium ruled by metadata (which is, surprise, surprise, the approach of the Metadata project), lists and rankings move right into the centre of the Internet. They are a place, where power is centralised and exercised, but once again, this can be good or bad. And even more so, it can be contested, as we can see in the example of the recent ranking revolutions on Nico Nico Douga. The Nico Chuu did not fight to abolish rankings. They fought for a particular form, how rankings should be organised in their opinion.

To sum up: Lists and rankings are an undervalued dimension of the Internet, and they should be understood from scratch, without an approach that mingles aesthetic objections too easily with political ones. In the next post I develop a (Non-Deleuzian) idea of assemblage, which will be the base camp for what is to come.