I recently visited Christopher Baker’s Hello World! Or: How I Learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise exhibition at Franklin Art Works in Minneapolis. On display was a video installation that depicted 3,000 bloggers recording entries for their video diaries.

The sheer size of the video installation—15’x48’—is visually overwhelming. The combined voices of the bloggers formed a backdrop of murmurs. At times, it was almost possible to isolate a voice but in the next few moments, it was lost among the others again.

Baker uses the visual and aural effects to express that the internet falls short of being a channel for democratic, participatory media—content may be published by anyone but not everyone can be heard (or in most cases, read).

Initially, I agreed, but I think the question is not whether everyone can be heard equally but whether their content can be found. In both traditional and online media, it is inherently impossible to aggregate everyone’s opinions in a way that is digestible without losing nuances of what they are expressing. Further, it is unnecessary to do so. People are interested in topics that are relevant to them. It is through the individual pursuit of sharing, finding and acting upon information that collectively enables everyone’s opinion to be heard. A crucial aspect in this process is optimizing content so that it is found by those who search for it. In the digital space, search engine optimization can thus act as an equalizer.