Searchable Memory

I was confused about my project. The more I asked myself questions, the more I lost direction. A mind map is not as clear as a physical paper map—it moves in every direction without following a timeline. At certain points, the past becomes the present, and the future becomes the past. As if the text begins on the final page and moves backwards, thought does not unfold linearly, nor can it be easily organised within a fixed frame.

Last year, I explored how reading functions in the mind—more specifically, in human consciousness. Human recognition is a combination of external stimuli and stored experience, and since only around 10% of those stimuli come from visual input, we are in fact repeatedly storing information about an object over time. Memory—as we define it—is a concept that encompasses these layered recognitions. It is also shaped by culture, which may be understood as a form of collective memory. In this sense, individuals both produce and store information, and through the act of sharing, this becomes cultural memory and collective experience.

Deleuze once described the Internet as a form of temporal memory. In many ways, it functions like the process through which we construct society. However, from a cultural perspective, this temporality struggles to provide adequate contextual structure. Culture itself becomes the context through which we recognise the real. And unlike website links or printed pages, this context is difficult to break down or reframe.

One of the most useful and efficient features of the internet—perhaps the most—is “searching,” or the function of Ctrl + F. It offers a way to return to a specific point in the context as it was originally written. Just as a book has pages, the internet breaks knowledge down—letter by letter, person by person. It also allows us to see the world individually, both retrospectively and prospectively. Search engines such as Google or Yahoo provide opportunities for information to survive as distinct visions. For instance, the now-familiar function of “tagging” enables multiple perspectives to emerge—of people, objects, or ideas—that are preserved as differentiated fragments.

Now, all objects exist as individuals, not as part of a unified whole. These fragmentary, pulverised images are stored in a shared imaginary space and come to constitute what we call “culture.”

We have lived through a brief era of visibility shaped by technologies such as television, radio, and photography—but now, searchability has become a new kind of power, one with political implications.