Keywords In and Out of Context

A surprisingly overlooked and undercited 2009 piece in American Art by University of Pennsylvania art historian Dr. Michael Leja is an early and eloquent investigation of the cultural role of the keyword in the online environment.

He wrote, “We are entering a new phase in the commercialization and commodification of language, and as it increasingly encompasses the kinds of Internet materials used by scholars, we will have to learn to recognize, counteract, and resist its effects. . . . Search-engine corporations guard their secret formulas for ranking results, but often a major ingredient is popularity: the results that have interested most people conducting a similar search are the results shown first. For those who believe in the wisdom of crowds, this may not be cause for concern, but it is another normalizing pressure against which independent thinking will have to struggle. I am proposing, in short, that ‘keyword’ has become one of the revealing keywords of our time. Its indispensability to Internet communication is confirmed by the near impossibility of searching it. ‘Keyword’ cannot be made opaque, an object of study in itself. A search for the etymology or history of ‘keyword’ insistently produces a definition of ‘etymology’ or ‘history.” Like many of the words that matter most, that tell us most about our intellectual and material life and about our cognitive and perceptual habits, “keyword” hides in plain view. Titling an essay ‘Keyword’ is one way to ensure that it will disappear into the void” (p. 35).

I quote from this essay in the first chapter of my book, both because the book does try to make the keyword “an object of study in itself” and because I hope to rescue Dr. Leja’s own astute observation from the void of non-citation, as it deserves to be much more widely known.