The Tomarken.com Sovereign Google-Bomb and Jennifer Lopez Naked Party.
Richard Tebrick, Moderator of Cultural Modulation
1. What is a Google-Bomb?
A term supposedly coined by a gentleman named Adam Mathes, which ‘exploits’ the infamous Google PageRank algorithm. In Mr. Mathes’ own words:
“Google is unique among search engines in that while it almost always shows you pages that have the exact keywords you are looking for, occasionally it will show you pages that don’t have those keywords, but other pages linked to that page with those words.”
So the idea, roughly, is that you get a bunch of people to link to a given site using a certain phrase. For example, let’s pretend that you have your own website. What you (and a lot of other people, if this were to work) would do is add the following code to your website:
Subsequently, if you added your site to the Google search index, and so did our bunch of hypothetical compatriots, then a search for “Jennifer Lopez Naked Party” might well return Tomarken.com pretty high on the list of sites. Want to see it in action? Try searching “miserable failure” on Google. The top returns are all the resultant of Google-bombing.
So a Google-bomb is a distributed action on the part of a like-minded community to manipulate the way that web-based information (in it’s abstracted container of urls) is presented by the premiere technology for the location of relevant web-based information. This is not a misinformation per-sé, as the keywords assigned are nothing if not a polemical stance on the content of the resultant site (the content of a polemics never being particularly informative). The text of a Google-bomb can not be news or science in any way, but, of course, it is politics. Lyotard: “To speak is to fight.” We are always polemical citizens: I also think that George W. Bush is a miserable failure. But, Google-bombing is always a violent act! The foreign imposition of search terms, the conditions of information access being re-developed from an exterior source is a violence. Perhaps a violence against perceived misinformation, against the signified of a celebrity, against a person-as-such, against an ideology, but always a violence nonetheless!
2. What is a Jennifer Lopez Naked Party?
A Jennifer Lopez Naked Party is a search term that is going to return a bunch of porno advertisement sites when you use Google. More than likely, none of the top results in the search will actually have any content relating to what might logically constitute the expected (semantically derivable) imagery pertaining to the phrase. Which, in my mind, would be:
P1: A gathering of people for pleasure,
P2: at which one or more of the gatherers were unclothed,
P3: and at which Jennifer Lopez would also be found,
P4: and perhaps, would be the hostess.
The last of these is of course debatable, given that almost certainly any “naked party” at which Jennifer Lopez was present would more than likely come to be known as the “Jennifer Lopez Naked Party”, owing largely to her celebrity status. Further, I think the common expectation would be that Jennifer Lopez herself would be unclothed, but simultaneously I think that there is no linguistic guarantor of that, and ultimately it’s expressedness depends on the reader of the phrase and not the writer, see:
1. [Jennifer Lopez Naked] Party
2. [Jennifer Lopez] Naked Party
It is also worth noting at this point, that while the phrase “Jennifer Lopez Naked Party” seems to this reader to be one which contains the possibility for a particularly high number of monthly internet searches worldwide (again, largely due to Ms. Lopez’s celebrity status, her infamous anatomical endowment, and the degree to which men allow themselves to take libidinal suggestion from the popular media), the search for the phrase in quotes returns only 39 results, while the unquoted search returns about 122,000, at least as of today, Jan. 24, 2004.
122,000 is no small potatoes!
Also, we will note that by the time that the Tomarken.com Sovereign Google-Bomb explodes, the text of the attached image will no longer be true. The content of this document is self-eradicating!
3. So what exactly is the Tomarken.com Sovereign Google-Bomb?
I have claimed before that Tomarken.com is the anti-blog. So it is! But, “difference implies the negative, and allows itself to lead to contradiction, only to the extent that its subordination to the identical is maintained.” (So says Deleuze!) Pop cultural informatics touch us each one. However, outside of our friends in The Digit World, Beckmann has hung up a hand-stitched “Does not play well with Others” sign above the old Tomarken.com foyer. We are the old-school Chinese regime of the blog/anti-blog community. So be it! Tomarken.com is it’s own Google-Bomb!
4. How is this that, again?
What we are looking for is a certain anti-matter of a Google-Bomb, which is a distinctly community derived informatics. So, a Sovereign Google-Bomb is internally contradictory already. If the anti-matter was not so dependent on its Other, its Matter, anything-at-all, including nothing-at-all, would be Google-Bomb antimatter. Or, more pointedly, antimatter would be an infinitely null set of possibility. Further we realize that there is no sovereignty, there is no Google-Bomb outside of a community, a network of information sources and sourcers. However, what we are looking for is a sort of pragmatic sovereignty, which will allow us to cast this document as a disparity and not a community. The affectation of meta-information about Google-bombing, the document’s participation in a community Google-bombing, and the teleportation (linkage) of information to the positive pole allow the shape of our negativity to be traced.
Hocus pocus! Google-bombing is the already anti-matter of content and meta-content as contained in Tomarken.com, or any ‘classical’ web page. The Tomarken.com Sovereign Google-Bomb is nothing but the performativity of a web document! Aletheia, Abracadabra, a ploy for an already extant content-based searchability. A deception of expectation, but not of information - a non-polemical politics. Doing it the old-fashioned way.
5. Question and Answer
Q: Richard, you just wrote this to get hits, right? “Jennifer Lopez Naked Party”?
A: Of course! Right. This is what honest, content-driven websites are about. The most broad-reaching content gets the most hits. As a moderator, it is my job to develop content that will pique the interest of as many people as possible. This document is an information honesty! It is the only quoted-phrase searchable document of the (40) that contains any legitimate reference to the search term!
Q: Rt, how do I not look like a fool when I am unsure whether an unfamiliar set of double doors open by pushing or pulling? I couldn’t stand the humiliation of doing the wrong thing!
A: First casually look for a sign. If this is inapplicable (for whatever reason), there is a simple way to solve the problem: Suavely push on one door and pull on the other! It will look like you are just using one for balance. Tré cool!
Q: Rich, can you do six degrees between Hollywood starlet “J-Lo” and Jean-François Lyotard, the father of postmodernism?
A: Yes I can, my friend. Starlet “J-Lo” was in the 2002 waste of film, Enough with Ms. Juliette Lewis (1), who, seven years earlier was in the Jim Carroll classic, The Basketball Diaries with the now-famous Mr. Leonardo DiCaprio (2). Mr. DiCaprio capitalized on his fame in the same year as the aforementioned Enough, to make the bloated Catch Me if you Can with the truly retardedly famous Tom Hanks (3) who, in 1993 had made the now infamous sappy chick story, Sleepless in Seattle which, by some strange twist of fate, also featured the inimitable Mr. Bill Pullman (4). Mr. Pullman was of course the lead role in the 1997 classic Lost Highway directed by one Mr. David Lynch (5). Mr. Lynch is a professor of Film at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland which was founded by the immanent M. Lyotard (6).
