The otaku themselves are aware of this situation. The otaku search engine “TINAMI” launched in 1996 signifies this awareness with an actual device (Figure 8). To enable the user to find illustrations from tens of thousands of registered sites, this searchable database classifies and quantifies various characteristics of otaku illustrations in detail. The site is equipped with selectable parameters so that the user can search for moe-elements. That is to say, the user can search for the desired characteristics of things like “cat ears” and “maid costumes,” or can set “the percentage of characters appearing” at more than 75 percent, “the age of character” at between 10 and 15, and “the degree of déformé” at 5 in order to find desired characters categorized in the database. Figure 9 shows the actual search window of “TINAMI.”
As the Internet spread and the site of otaku activities moved to the Web during the late 1990s, search engines such as “TINAMI” began to play a prominent role. In such an environment, the producers, like it or not, must have been conscious of their position relative to the whole of otaku culture. As soon as the characters are created, they are broken up into elements, categorized, and registered to a database. If there is no appropriate classification, a new element or category simply will be added. In this sense, the originality of an “original” character can only exist as a simulacrum.
Azuma, Hiroki. Japan's Database Animals. University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
The question of the network, as Jeremy Rifkin has shown well, is access. What is important is the filters. The search engines that permit the ranking of information charge those whom they reference. This is always a question of selection.
The media deploy industrial technology for the exploitation of consciousness, and do so through the imposition of retentional criteria. This control of retentional systems where consciousness is a market, where an hour of consciousness is worth the sum of the advertising receipts divided by the number of viewers, has the effect of homogenizing secondary retention. And this is an essential cause (if not the only cause) of what I call ill-being. The control of retention implies the loss of identity, that is, of difference. Nietzsche saw very clearly this lost capacity to produce a difference and the tendency of societies falsely named “individualistic” to deny the exception. Our supposedly individualistic societies are in reality perfectly conformist.
Stiegler, Bernard. Acting Out. Stanford University Press, 2009.