Sunday, February 11, 2007
Living simulated lives. CoryTheRaven has responded by video to Michael Wesch's Web 2.0 video, sharing the text through KSU's Digital Ethnography site. This passage is very interesting:
But the real acchievement of the internet has been to SIMULATE participation. It has made non-participatory addition of responsive content more rapid… even instantaneous.
This relates, I think, to the three shades of comment I was trying to name in a post earlier today: comments that chant back the usual phrases of praise or blame, comments that are specific enough that the authority can use them to think further, and comments that participate in a collectively-functioning space. Comment might not be a very rich form of participation, or might not be participation at all. We're still sitting at our laptops in our bathrobes as the earth warms and the oceans rise around us.
Cory thinks the web will improve as it takes on richer sensory layers, or imitates these in better virtual realities, with this goal:
We’re trying to make the printed word imitate what we already experience every day… The natural interaction between us and the world.
He might be right -- it's just not easy for me to imagine what virtual reality means for our bodies, our streets and houses, our jobs, and so forth. I'm tempted to go to Mojiti and set up a new version of Michael Wesch's piece that invites people to comment about the relation of Web 2.0 to our embodied lives. [0 & P]
But the real acchievement of the internet has been to SIMULATE participation. It has made non-participatory addition of responsive content more rapid… even instantaneous.
This relates, I think, to the three shades of comment I was trying to name in a post earlier today: comments that chant back the usual phrases of praise or blame, comments that are specific enough that the authority can use them to think further, and comments that participate in a collectively-functioning space. Comment might not be a very rich form of participation, or might not be participation at all. We're still sitting at our laptops in our bathrobes as the earth warms and the oceans rise around us.
Cory thinks the web will improve as it takes on richer sensory layers, or imitates these in better virtual realities, with this goal:
We’re trying to make the printed word imitate what we already experience every day… The natural interaction between us and the world.
He might be right -- it's just not easy for me to imagine what virtual reality means for our bodies, our streets and houses, our jobs, and so forth. I'm tempted to go to Mojiti and set up a new version of Michael Wesch's piece that invites people to comment about the relation of Web 2.0 to our embodied lives. [0 & P]
Thinking beyond synonyms. The Mojiti version of Micheal Wesch's Web 2.0 video is still available for viewer comment -- with the comments showing up right in the video. A few days ago most of the comments were, rightly, notes of praise for the remarkable compression and energy of the piece. We see how difficult it is to engage the specificity of the piece and find something concrete to say beyond a synonym for "good" or "bad" -- perhaps many of our everyday blog posts consist largely of fancy sets of synonyms like this. I know the first time I tried to respond to the piece I had little to offer beyond a synonym.
As the days have gone by, participants have had more luck extending the work being done by the video -- suggesting information that might enrich it as it is revised, for example. Viewers are offering something back to the creator, then.
If you view this Mojiti version in the right spirit, you can imagine that a few of the comments are meant to belong to the video itself -- to create not revision notes but a new video that extends the old one, even though it is now less than two weeks old.
So the author function wavers here -- in many of the comments Micheal Wesch is treated as the most traditional of authors, an authority to be praised in glowing reviews. In others, he remains an authority in his field and the authority over this particular text, and Mojiti viewers submit comments that he may or may not take into account as he revises. Perhaps in other comments, just a few, Mojiti allows Wesch to slip out of either of those authorial guises and give authorship over to the collective, at least for a time.
In the Mojiti version, Wesch and a few collaborators seem to have found their way to the edge of a zone predicted by Tim Berners-Lee in 1997. In "Realising the Full Potential of the Web," he concluded that "We are forming cells within a global brain and we are excited that we might start to think collectively. What becomes of us still hangs crucially on how we think individually."
It's fascinating to look at Berners-Lee's careful balancing between collective and individual in those two sentences. He predicts both the collectively-functioning space, such as Mojiti, and the individual responsibility for it.
Those bloggish synonyms for "good" and "bad" don't enter the space he imagines much, if at all. The comments for Wesch's revision operate in a collectively-functioning space, but for the purposes of helping the author think about his revision (which should benefit the collective, too). A few of the Mojiti comments may seek to live only in the collective space -- offered by individuals who are sharing responsibility directly for the collective thought? Perhaps.
Berners-Lee hoped that we can leave the Web "clean and simple so that the next generation can learn its logical concepts along with the alphabet," for "if we can make something decentralised, out of control, and of great simplicity, we must be prepared to be astonished at whatever might grow out of that new medium." Again, individuals and the collective, both at work in his vision, but creativity coming not just from individuals, stars, geniuses.
The YouTube version doesn't raise these issues as directly because we can't write on the surface of the video. Perhaps Mojiti with its images and music embodies and recharges discussions about individual and collective that wiki founders and innovators worked out some time ago. [0 & P]
As the days have gone by, participants have had more luck extending the work being done by the video -- suggesting information that might enrich it as it is revised, for example. Viewers are offering something back to the creator, then.
If you view this Mojiti version in the right spirit, you can imagine that a few of the comments are meant to belong to the video itself -- to create not revision notes but a new video that extends the old one, even though it is now less than two weeks old.
So the author function wavers here -- in many of the comments Micheal Wesch is treated as the most traditional of authors, an authority to be praised in glowing reviews. In others, he remains an authority in his field and the authority over this particular text, and Mojiti viewers submit comments that he may or may not take into account as he revises. Perhaps in other comments, just a few, Mojiti allows Wesch to slip out of either of those authorial guises and give authorship over to the collective, at least for a time.
In the Mojiti version, Wesch and a few collaborators seem to have found their way to the edge of a zone predicted by Tim Berners-Lee in 1997. In "Realising the Full Potential of the Web," he concluded that "We are forming cells within a global brain and we are excited that we might start to think collectively. What becomes of us still hangs crucially on how we think individually."
It's fascinating to look at Berners-Lee's careful balancing between collective and individual in those two sentences. He predicts both the collectively-functioning space, such as Mojiti, and the individual responsibility for it.
Those bloggish synonyms for "good" and "bad" don't enter the space he imagines much, if at all. The comments for Wesch's revision operate in a collectively-functioning space, but for the purposes of helping the author think about his revision (which should benefit the collective, too). A few of the Mojiti comments may seek to live only in the collective space -- offered by individuals who are sharing responsibility directly for the collective thought? Perhaps.
Berners-Lee hoped that we can leave the Web "clean and simple so that the next generation can learn its logical concepts along with the alphabet," for "if we can make something decentralised, out of control, and of great simplicity, we must be prepared to be astonished at whatever might grow out of that new medium." Again, individuals and the collective, both at work in his vision, but creativity coming not just from individuals, stars, geniuses.
The YouTube version doesn't raise these issues as directly because we can't write on the surface of the video. Perhaps Mojiti with its images and music embodies and recharges discussions about individual and collective that wiki founders and innovators worked out some time ago. [0 & P]
| PREV page | NEXT page |