About a week ago, I noticed that the “hits” on my blog almost doubled overnight, and they have only continued to increase after that. Since I haven’t been speed-dating or indiscriminately publicizing my blog site, this really didn’t make any sense to me. So, after a little further investigation, I discovered that somehow, I really don’t know how, my blog is the first thing that comes up when one Googles “sad songs.” (Go ahead and try it, you’ll see.)
It’s really weird. I don’t know how that happened. For those of you who ended up on this site because you were seeking the deep and hidden truth of sad songs, I’m sorry I can’t help you. (I’ve basically had two “sad songs” related posts on this blog: the first was “Sad Songs Say So Much” in November 2007, and the second was “Sad Songs (Still) Say So Much,” which was in June of this year.) But, since you’re here, I do recommend you download my most recent all-sad-songs radio show to your iPod, which should serve as some kind of consolation.
I also want to say, for the record, that if this is my 15 seconds of fame– because, surely, in the age of the Internet, Andy Warhol’s caluclation must be truncated– then being associated with “sad songs” is about all the fame I could’ve ever hoped for.
Since you’re here anyway looking for sad songs, here’s one that you’ll probably never hear on my radio show, but it’s a bona fide sad song nonetheless:
Search engines capitalize on that Wittgensteinian moment in which we “don’t know our way around”, in which something becomes a question. That search engines do not really have an “oracular” quality, however, and are clumsy for answering a question (e.g. in a philosophical mode) may be in part because the internet is not really a “semantic web”; search engines are algorithmic and cross-reference on a fairly surface level.
I guess what this brings up for me is that we as humans often don’t quite know what we are “searching” for– and the tendency for the machine world to misdirect us doesn’t help things.
oooooooooooooooooooohh
I’m JEALOUS
Dr. J, you’ve been bumped to #2!
In the best of all possible worlds what search would you choose to be identified with anyway (if any)?
we’ve been getting a lot of hits for “colon” – oh well, come for the colon, stay for… whatever is the latest popular organ!