The Unknown Soldier

HTML, the common language of the Web, has evolved like any other language, natural or artificial, and many elements which were originally useful have perished into obsolescence or are on the verge of extinction. One such fossil is the META tag "AUTHOR" that allows a web author to identify themselves in their HTML code so that web crawlers can easily pick up their names. This evolution may illustrate one of the most revolutionary implications of the Web: the shift in focus from the individual alone to the connections between individuals. In other words, the individual as a data unit, not autonomous but deriving identity from one's place in the system.

"The Unknown Soldier" is a nostalgic look at the individual-based perspective of the Web as a medium: as publishing tool, as dating service, as shopping catalog. I use the infome software in two phases:

Phase I

I scan through 5,000 links and grab all the AUTHOR tags. I am going back in time to find the individuals that "make the Web".

Phase II

I take a sample of 40 authors and attempt to recreate a sense of who they are by feeding each name back into the Web. The crawler searches for the author's name on a search engine and returns the most common words found on the first 16 links. It also generates a 16-block square fingerprint (based on this search) which represents the author's recreated identity.

The crawler scrambles for information to eulogize the Unknown Soldier of the Web like it is rummaging through ruins of a collapsed building. Some artifacts fit the puzzle and some do not. Who would I be if I recreated my identity through the connectivity and non-hierarchical structure of the information database?