Blog #6

Jeeeenkinss

I'd say the focal point of the introduction is the concept that content has been divorced from its traditional medium. He talks a lot about convergence, which is a pretty loosely defined term that academics and buzzword men have been throwing around for a couple of decades at this point. The fact that no two sources are really agreeing on what it means is fairly telling - it doesn't mean anything, it's just a sort of zeitgeist catchall buzzword that is intended to evoke the ideas that Jenkins was trying to nail to the page:

• As in Weinberger, participation makes the definition of who produces the content a fuzzy one. Convergence in this sense describes the intersection, overlap, and in some cases replacement between and of user-generated culture and the supposed culture factories - the content distributors and producers.
• Multimedia convergence is another one he's trying to talk about, which is describing the phenomenon that no one medium controls the delivery of these traditional media - film is available on your computer, broadcast TV, your cable connection, your phone, the movie theater and on the new generation of set-top streaming internet devices. News comes from papers, television, podcasts, blogs as well as good old word of mouth. This bleed-through of content from one medium to the next is what Weinberger would probably point to as the disintegration of the traditional first and second orders of order.
• Another definition of convergence is related to the first one I brought up which is user participation through mediated channels with the content producers - as in the reality show examples of American Idol and Survivor - in one case the audience has virtually no power and is merely being given a token means of participation, and in the other, the audience is winning the intelligence arms race against the producers who are trying to preserve the element of surprise. I'm not sure that I've seen anything in Weinberger that directly compares with that, but he'd certainly be fascinated by the Survivor leaks community and their use of social media to coordinate large scale intel operations.

Blog #5

Meaning

Heidegger's web of meaning is a view that states that we know an object less in its form than in its relation to other things - they derive "meaning" per Heidegger in the same way that a person would describe how a thing acquires purpose. Heidegger's "meaning" is the sum of our understanding of an object in the context of what that object is for not just what the item is. He puts forth that the identity of an item is meaningless without some understanding of its role in the world around it.

Weinberger

Weinberger associates this with his understanding of metadata and his "third order of order." The contextual information that describes the significance of a piece of data is Weinberger's third order of order. The tags and links we associate with ideas and units of information to make them easier to find are an externalization of our understanding of the significance of the data - not just a reference card, but a new piece of information that actually represents the meaning of a thing.

Musical diagram

I don't typically identify with music on a cognitive emotional level - other than associating certain songs with memory (and not necessarily for any good reason) I identify with music solely on the basis of a sort of content-independent reading of the character of the music, attitude with which it is delivered, then develop an appreciation of the music largely based on my emotional state at the time. In other words, I sort of roll with the song. "Come Together" by The Beatles is a good example - for all intents and purposes, that song is about absolutely nothing, but it has a mean groove to it which has been bridging generations since it came out.

Therefore, selecting a song that has some sort of meaning to me is a bit difficult - there are a few songs that have just stuck with me over the years due to their delivery and some of their tonal characteristics. There are a few songs that make me feel nostalgic for purely emotional reasons, and a few that just plain get stuck in my head. I'm going to just have to pick one that falls into both categories:

"Low Rider" by War. My understanding of the song would be pretty difficult for any computer to make any sense of, as every bit of data about it is associative, save for a small number of physical characteristics of the song itself. The computer would need to understand human nature - the degree to which nostalgia affects our perception of the quality of an item, the degree to which nostalgia is formed based on the completeness of our memory of the events associated with the item, etc. It would also need to understand my own personal associations related to the cultural linkages of various forms of media, the identifiability of the song's signature over loud background noise, the historical playlist data of the radio stations that I listened to in my area in the 1990s, and the fact that my one great adventure in life (so far) with my best friends took place while listening a few CDs, two of which that song featured on.

Steep demands from a handful of silicon atoms.

Blog Post #4

The most important common point I've seen between the Web 2.0 & Web Squared documents and Weinberger is the notion of liberating the second order of order...

Web Squared makes a big deal of the "sensor net" and how this data is being used to re-order other data - from world maps built using Flickr geotags to the information shadows of commercial media. Weinberger talks about collecting this information not only from passive user input but also active user input - from de.licio.us to the vast, constantly in flux pool of knowledge contained in Wikipedia. O'Reilly covered the value of both deliberately user-contributed data and the passive data in his "What is Web 2.0" article: not only through deliberate sources like Flickr and Wikipedia but also passively in the form of Google's Pagerank.

All three documents have in common a fascination with Wikipedia - not only that it works at all, but in that it actually works quite well.

"Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia based on the unlikely notion that an entry can be added by any web user, and edited by any other, ...is already in the top 100 websites, and many think it will be in the top ten before long. This is a profound change in the dynamics of content creation!" (O'Reilly, "What is Web 2.0?")
"On paper, it sounds like a terrible idea. Build an encyclopedia by letting anyone create or edit an article, even anonymously. Yet four years after its launch at the beginning of 2001, Wikipedia had more people reading its pages than the New York Times' Web site did... its shape, freed from the two dimensions of paper, better represents the wild diversity of human interests and insights." (Weinberger, "Everything is Miscellaneous" pp. 99-100)

At its guts, both the O'Reilly articles and "Everything is Miscellaneous" are concerned with the transformation in the character of human interaction with human information - from the old order of words stored in physical paper with a form of scarcity dictated by the crude laws of Newtonian physics to the new order of data-driven reality, transported in a more Einsteinian and Turing-based world where everyone can have access to a copy of anything that exists if the economic factors are right.