<![CDATA[Dave Rogers writes:
While we’re not yet at the place where the innate wisdom of users blends seamlessly with the work of trained professionals, it may be closer than we think.
The problem with folksonomies, as the self-organized taxonomics of semantic networks are called, is that they emphasize collective agreement about meaning while most change comes from stubborn individuals who cling to, push forward and verify new meanings. There is a sense in the discussion about folksonomy that, once such things are settled, we’ll be pulling into the train station at Nirvana.
What I want to be sure of is that folksonomies stay flexible. David Weinberger writes about three conclusions for a discussion of tagging:
1. Rather than knowledge ending where the miscellaneous begins, now it’s beginning with the miscellaneous. (In your face, Aristotle!)
2. In the continuing battle between the forces of neatness and messiness, tagging advances the cause of messiness. (I think that’s a good thing, but you’re talking to a guy who last night was given the employees discount at a food stand at the airport because the cashier just assumed I worked there.)
3. We are owning not just our information but the organization of information. This is part of the project of re-meaning the world – make meaning ours – in which we’ve been engaged for decades.
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I like messy, because messy implies perpetual change. I don’t think all this will be settled, nor that we will ever make meaning ours, because changing meaning is the birthright of successive generations. We’ll only make it ours for a time, then we have to trust the kids to make their own.]]>
4 replies on “Elusive synchrony is okay”
So, we make our meaning ours, as it is now, from us as the primary source(s) … rather than relying on top-down filtered and edited sources whose main endeavour is to make their meaning ours for now ?
Is it not the case that some form of credibility may come from our having access to an aggregated set of views on a situation … that offers a reader their own experience of a process of knitting together opinions, links, analyses, questions, verbal frictions ?
We can become (or are becoming ?) the point where takes place the knitting together of sources of information … we can choose the sources much more easily than even only a few years ago, those sources can be delivered directly to us in a wider range of easier-to-use ways, and we have new tools at our disposal for combing, re-mixing and slicing and dicing the information from those sources in order to assess, compare, analyse, and finally for participating, by writing and commenting … blogging.
We may be creating a different process than watching tv and reading newspapers for building up our own views and judgments about a situation, and comparing that with what happens and how it happens … perhaps not different cognition for developing and assessing credibility, but different paths and logistics for how meaning and credibility occur.
Jon—I concur that the access to sources is exploding, that the aggregation of sources is ever easier and that meaning is no longer dictated so easily. We tend to forget that the 50-year reign of TV was an abberation; in the years before TV, when communities talked about news filtering in from the outside world, a persistent skepticism ruled.
But my concern is that in today’s world, it is very easy to build a worldview that seems complete but that is actually quite closed-minded. The power of groups and collective thinking cuts both ways and my point with this posting is to emphasize the fact that “making meaning ours” is a transitory event. We don’t need another generation dictating to the future what is right, wrong and dangerous, as we have plenty of that today.
Respectfully, Mitch, I agree 😉 perhaps it wasn’t clear in my comment above .. future generations will no doubt use whatever today’s and tomorrow’s technology and social interaction evolves to become to make their meaning, and the context(s) may be quite different, notwithstanding the fundamental steadfastness of the core of whatever is human nature.
As an example, there’s a mad rush to embrace tagging as an or “the” answer, and as you point out, it ain’s necessarily so. I’ve been caught up in the last week or so in re-reading Federman and de Kerckhove’s “McLuhan For Managers” and trying to understand some vague sense I have that there’s some kind of parallel between the accumulated-over-time results of tagging in hig-activity domains and the internalization and ready use of management clichés .. which somehow probably ties to your point re: “close-mindedness”.
Yes, the problem is that every fad becomes a dogma and old people tell young people that they shouldn’t step out of line (and people tell themselves they shouldn’t step out of line, which is the real tragedy).