T Campbell's Blog

This again.

With Fans, I sometimes felt I was cheating. After all, its message was the ultimate in geek-validation: don’t hate, don’t stereotype, don’t dismiss that stuttering science-fiction buff, there’s more to him than meets the eye. Perhaps it’s a desire to fly without that sort of net that has driven me to tackle the far more difficult topic of search, many times now from several directions. Or perhaps it’s penance. Or masochism. Or the railroad industry. Who knows?

No, I know.

It’s because it’s important.

Important enough for me to keep after it.

It’s not like the last five years have been too encouraging on this front. There was Search Engine History, a book I proposed to literary agents when I was just starting out (in 2001. Oh, you thought Web history was in flux now?). Search, an adaptation of that history in comics format (well done for six installments, a casualty of overwork after that). And then there was Search Engine Funnies. Though I work better with a long-term plan than responding to immediate events, that series pleased me more often than not, especially thanks to the artists. I think I'd learned from the failure of the previous but it fell victim to what might be described as a perfect storm.

At the end of that storm, I announced the possibility of an SEF sequel, and I had an animated discussion in Brighton about it with an accomplished search engine satirist... but at this point, I just can't see my way past certain production difficulties.

So... geez. Shoot. Quux. I might be forgiven for leaving search to the programmers from here on out.

But this is important. This is about what words mean. This is about what thoughts come to people’s minds, because technology puts those thoughts there. This is about what knowledge we access—what technology helps us access. And this is about the people who control that technology. Currently those people are mostly well-meaning idealists who don’t spend much time away from their screens, a few power brokers who have helped make the world what it is today, and the invisible hand of the market. What does that really mean for the rest of us?

I’ve been thinking about how to distill my ideas about that into this essay, and I’ve concluded that it’s not gonna happen. They're too big, too wild and too free-associative to be constrained to nonfiction and to words. I’ll be taking a week or so off from this “Reflections” series—because first, I have to finish their real repository.

This is important.

Important enough to keep after it until I get it right.

Keep watching this space, though. A few miscellaneous announcements coming up.