I begin in error, but also in good company. In 1998 I watched the digital artist Rob Nideffer give a talk on virtual culture. It was an excellent talk, as I know from having read the published article, but I couldn't have supported that impression at the time. Along with most of the audience, I paid very little attention to what was said. Rob totally upstaged himself with a visual aid, the same one you see at the top of the screen here: a live ticker showing queries typed into one of the major Web search engines.

The original program, a Java applet called "SearchTicker," was created by operators of the WebCrawler search engine essentially as a toy (it was stored in a directory called "Fun"). For reasons unknown it is no longer available, though the proprietors of the MetaCrawler engine still maintain a site called MetaSpy that shows live queries in a different visual format.

Besides offering cheap thrills and a great counterpoint to academic palaver, the query ticker (which I have simulated here) provides an interesting occasion for thinking about what it means to read electronic texts and how this literacy fits into a larger digital culture. In fact, I think the ticker should be formally recognized as a cultural resource. The Vice President has proposed sending up a satellite to provide real-time images of our planet from space, the better to remind us of where we are in the universe. In a complementary act of high-tech symbolism, I believe we should install giant-size query displays in all the world's capitals. This might tell us something about who we are as symbol-making animals. If we can fly a mission to planet Earth, we should also mount one to that strange world called the Web.

The query ticker offers what may be the nearest approach to a reading of the Web -- not in its unknowable totality, of course, but as an active process. Scanning the ticker is like watching a river flow--a very large river well above flood stage, one that passes through many urban areas and trailer parks, picking up random content as it goes. In thinking about what it means to read this shifting surface, we may discover a new form of literacy.