On the surface, text searching engines have undeniably changed the game of academic research. Information on just about any topic you might be interested in is at your disposal with a stroke of your fingertips, and with the entire internet available, you’re not confined to just the interests of whatever journals or encyclopedias are locally available. Search engines like Google aren’t just purposed for the classroom, either. I know that I probably look something up online at least two or three times a day, and if I’m not writing an essay, I can guarantee it’s usually not questions of an academic nature. In a way, these engines function much like the FAP, with their core philosophy that art (or information) “should belong to the people as a whole” (Bindas, xii).
The search engine and the greater internet go back hand-in-hand for decades. What were both, after all, if not some of the first digital projects? One of the most common dismissals of internet-era technology is that we got by without it for far longer than we’ve had it, but how many strides forward have been achieved by the instantaneous global connection which the internet and its thousands, if not millions, of digital projects provides? Take the digital archive of early 20th Century writings by African American women that I researched earlier. How many of those writings might have been lost to the ages if someone hadn’t taken the time to immortalize them digitally? Without the arts, there is no culture, and culture is something that constantly evolves out of reaction to what came before. These writings were an important cornerstone for black feminist history, and their online preservation is just one example of something that can benefit a greater social movement.
Of course, the transition of physical media to digital media is an innate compromise of form. While your standard-issue poem or book might look and read about the same online, the person only able to process the information through a digital format loses the experience of holding it in their hands. Things such as physical covers and textual layout aren’t always thought to be carried over, when as much thought might have been put into them by the original publisher as their actual “content”. Printing errors are also often corrected for the well-intentioned purpose of making it easier for them to be read, but these errors can also tell us about what the circumstances surrounding the publication might have been like.
