The landscape speaks or getting to know the filter

Knowing the filter means to know the numerous things that have been filtered by it and being able to draw some commonality between them. But the filter has many dimensions and many entities flow through it for many reasons. It is not possible to determine why each entity passes through the filter. This approach is not likely to work because commonalities do not seem apparent. If we were hoping to reverse engineer the filter, those hopes must be given up. We have been interested in the filter because we want to make it broader and we want to understand the logic that has been programmed into it to exclude and include certain certain kinds of content. We have studied the content that has been included and the only thing common in the content has been a willingness amongst the content-providers to package and promote the content in a way that appeals to the filter. The basis for the filtration to happen has not been revealed and has not made itself apparent.

So, if we focus instead on the entities which have been excluded and attempt to find a commonality between them, then maybe we could understand the rationale of the filter.

How do we even imagine the content that is excluded by the filter? Does it even leave a shadow behind? How are we connected to the body of content that is excluded? If the filter is a kind of network operator that finds and rewards only kinship amongst the content entities it examines then it must be blind to the fragments which are not connected to each other because of a lack of any coherent strategy or narrative. When the filter’s users seek results they do not seek networks, they seek individual content items. The claim that networks help to establish the value of content items in a frame that mechanical content interpretation is not possible does not hold true in all cases. For dealing with the macro-reality of the landscape, liaisons and networks might make sense. But when it comes down to the interior, content entities actually rely on the filter to be able to search for and connect with other fragments. And this is where the filter fails, it fails to account for itself as a comprehensive map of content that ascribes value and offers access by actually assessing the content itself. If it lacks mechanical means of doing so, it must find other ways but it cannot claim to be perform the function delegated to it if it does not find a way.

The nature of the landscape we live in today is such that the fragments are seeking other fragments to form their own networks and they are finding it difficult to do so. There is no way for fragments to access other fragments if they choose for principled reasons to not play the games the filter requires them to play in order to take account of them.