Blog 6 - Its all about the *vergence

Henry Jenkins, author of Worship at the Altar of Convergence, attempts to tackle a problem put forth for many years: how will technology affect the creation, distribution, and consumption of media? This is no small question with no one right answer, but I feel that Jenkins does a good job in his introduction of laying out some basic premises and offering a look into some possible answers. Several key ideas, to me, are the concepts of participatory culture and convergence/divergence.

These terms are by no means complex. Explicitly, their definitions are in a dictionary and those definitions can be applied in general terms to ideas of (new) media, but lets dive a little deeper. Participatory culture is about dispersed contribution. Common examples already discussed at length include Wikipedia, Youtube, Reddit, and Facebook. The idea that content is no longer derived solely from a centralized source is almost second nature, especially to students of DTC, but turning back the clock reveals a completely different world. Going back 15 years, news was found on radio, tv, or paper, facts in books, and entertainment on a cartridge. In most cases, there was one primary resource used for understanding something. This led to interesting errors, such as a misplaced decimal point, leading to the incorrect perceived content of iron in spinach, which led to our favorite spinach-eating sailor. Today, such an error would never go so far. With millions of ways to verify and expand upon knowledge, our culture is able to contribute as a whole, not as individual nodes. To me, this is a great thing, but it certainly isn't some end to the discussion. While we now know how much iron is in spinach (not that much, really) participatory culture has had the unique effect of valuating opinions. Everyone can have an opinion no matter how crazy it is. We have yet to fully differentiate between the right to contribute and the privileged. Participatory culture has a long ways to go in that department.

Fortunately, participatory culture is not without its own tools of self regulation. Going back to Weinberger's Miscellaneous, we can see that while the internet as we know it is a literal explosion of information, there is now information about information that allows us to at least stay organized. Wikipedia is an excellent example, where articles are not only the information contained within, but also the history of all revisions and comments on those revisions. Services like Delicious allow users to tag information with information, allowing everyone to benefit from individual action, but avoid the input of rogue elements or outliers. Finally, computer technology itself allows everyone to have the same files, where before objects were limited by their physical nature, now people are not faced with such mundane issues as supply.

The second key point I find in Jenkins' introduction (among many), is the idea of convergence. He describes how convergence is on the opposite side of the coin as divergence and I can't help but agree. It is all a matter of perspective. Data and information can be seen as either converting from centralized control to decentralized (divergence), or that these concepts are now coming from all different places to one destination (convergence). Beyond this relatively straightforward idea is the premise of connectivity. Connections are how we navigate this world. Even without slipping into the philisophical (or existential, see previous post) it easy to point out how objects do not exist in and of themselves. All things have relationships, especially information. The construction of the internet was in fact all just hyperlinks. Connections from one page of text to another. Today we have fancier graphics, but the connections are still there, multiplying. Unfortunately, while I can connect Weinberger to the idea of particapatory culture, the only concept of connections (and convergence/divergence) within his text are strictly within the domain of information organization. While fitting for a book titled Everything is Miscellaneous, I feel that Jenkins does a better job of showing how these ideas are applicable to the entirety of the information age.

Weinberger Wordle

I made a smallish wordle that used recent posts regarding the three concepts in Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous. This isn't a full blog post, just a way to quickly and easily host the image.

So far, it seems we think Implicit, Explicit, and Three are important words. Are those the entire concepts? No way, but this wouldn't fit on twitter. I believe that the orders of order, existential/abstract vs concrete objects, and connections applied by human thought are the three most important concepts.

Blog Post 5 - Lets get Philisophical

Weinberger, in chapter 8 of Everything is Miscellaneous, discusses the ideas of implicit and explicit meaning. To do this he brings in German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Wikipedia has an excellent (and long) article about Heidegger, and while his history only partly plays a role in Weinberger's suggestions, it is important to know that Heidegger is known well for his existential ideas.

If you have never picked up any Sartre, it will be hard to describe existential thought. While Wikipedia could again provide direction, I find that existentialism is best described as something of an opposite thought process to what we would consider 'normal' in Western culture. In Western culture objects have meaning by existing. An apple on a desk would have a weight, color, size, and many different values that define it. For example, living in a consumerist society we often think about objects in terms of their price. Existentialism proposes that objects are not so much their physical selves as they are an idea, or abstract concept that has no set definition. There are of course many different peculiarities to existentialism, but I believe it can be tied directly to the concept of the implicit in Weinberger's work.

The text in question, "the meaning of a particular thing is enabled by the web of implicit meanings we call the world" (170), means to me that we do not define any one thing singular to itself. Everything is tied to something else. The apple on a desk is not just an arrangement of objects; it can be a gift for a teacher, or a representation of a classroom. Maybe it is a healthy snack for an overworked employee, a forgotten lunch. "Ah," you would say, "you simply didn't describe the apple and desk very well; if you did it would be less connected." Possibly, but I believe no description can fully capture the idea of an apple. All the associations we make with that apple, as individuals, branch out beyond the physical into the abstract. It is within that abstraction that the third order of orders is realized.

Weinberger makes the argument, across many chapters, that organizing the world around us has changed forever. Objects are no longer singular, they can be represented across many dimensions. Those representations are also no longer mutually exclusive due to recent technology such as tagging or databases. The implicit can be categorized, and while it might be blasphemy to Heidegger, the abstract can now be made explicit.

Below is a quick sketch I drew about I'm Gonna Be by The Proclaimers.