Press and Discovery
Based on the endless stream of weblog press (and the limited number of unique angles), I've come to the conclusion that a news article about weblogs is akin to a working volcano model at a science fair. Sure, it attracts everyone's attention for a minute or two, but can anyone really say that they learned anything new?
Here's a mainstream-friendly story I'd like to see written about weblogging:
The way weblogs are changing the way we're finding (and asking for) information on the web.
This post on my personal weblog was the prompt to this question. Written over a year ago, this entry has become an ongoing resource for those looking for specific songs in television commercials. I'll receive an email notification stating that a new comment has been posted -- usually a question such as "I really like the song in commercial X. Can you tell me what it is?" Despite evidence to the contrary, I always expect that these questions will go unanswered. That is, until someone shows up four days later from a similar search query and answers the question -- and usually leave a new one behind.
People find the entry usually via Google and the search terms "song commercial vw mercedes" and, as it appears to me, are completely unaware that the entry and its comments are part of a larger whole -- my weblog.
Comments like "I'm so happy I found this site!" or "What a great website!!" confirm this; there is an assumption that the entry, "Showroom Dummies" was created for purposes other than navel-gazing (Oh, how I have fooled them).
When I published that post and the mp3, unbeknownst to me, I became an ad-hoc AdCritic. So, without any real nurturing on my part, a mini-universe has come into existence within the comments of a post I've long-forgotten.
Ninety-nine comments later, it's easy to understand the reason that we all keep archives: weblogs aren't as temporal as we may think.
And while the resource of information can be found in other Internet outlets (news groups, mailing lists, message boards), it is the enthusiasm and personality behind weblogs that makes the source sweeter.
And then, there is the information we're finding by accident:Collaborative Serendipity, Manufactured Serendipity Targeted Serendipity. No matter what you call it, it's about changing the way we look for information.
It's empowering, yes. But at the same time, it places the responsibility of truth and knowledge in reporting, observing and stating on our shoulders.
We can think about that tomorrow.
9 Comments
"The Net negates geometry. While it does have a definite topology of computational nodes and radiating boulevards for bits... it is fundamentally and profoundly antispatial... You cannot say where it is or describe its memorable shape and proportions or tell a stranger how to get there. But you can find things in it without knowing where they are."
William J. Mitchell - City of Bits.
just thought that was seemingly relevant.
Not only is it antispatial, I tend to think of it as antitemporal. Who cares when information was posted? It is existential. If the page exists, then it can (hopefully) be found and referenced. In many circles, it does not matter how dated the information may actually be. It existed, and therefore, per the usual falacy, it must be important.
Could you please make available the templates you use for this site. Specifically, how are you hiding the trackback link when there are no trackback posts? Thanks in advance.
City of Bits URL
I'll make a prediction.
One hundred years from now none of what we currently consider so available, so non-spatial and so antitemporal will be available to students of the era. It will have evaporated in the unpreservable digital junk of these few decades.
Even if bits of it do survive, just think of the data entrophy, the failing relevancy, the loss of context and the magnification of noise.
If we are unlucky and some of it does actually survive, we will likely be remembered as the era when web-based psuedo-science replaced religion, the world discovered the self fullfilling prophesies of pedophiles and the surprise that beautiful women have sex with dogs and other beasts. In an era when the certainty of these things became unstoppable and pervasive, and surely changed us. How we dealt with it will ultimately be our measure.
I look at my own net adventures and sure, you can find posts of mine in Google from 1988 if you look hard enough, and sure, that's pretty amazing in itself. But I doubt that we have the logistical capability, the business rationale or the economic and polictical will to sustain those images of data in the same manner that a simple book or paper journal can.
I quite expect this period in the history of our species to be devoid of first hand access to the digital data these traditional mediums will speak of. Future historians will have to depend on the paper sources of the day, whose standards are clearly diminished when compared to the days without the Internet.
The faddishness, the flushes of fame, the smartassedness and the mundaneness of it all will hide the bright lights and the moments of Eureka.
None-the-less, there will surely be more fascinating insights into our period from the solid and reliable traditional sources that historians depend upon.
I don't know what it will be. A single novel? Perhaps we can hope that it is a poem or a painting that captures the essense of our time as a Warhol, a Byron or a Leonardo captured the essense of theirs.
It will not be the Usenet, the Web, the Blogging or trace back. I quite expect that the enthusiasm and hubris of these things will become a black hole in history, disappearing in a puff of digital smoke, in a time when a Napster simply means a drink at lunch and a snooze on a warm afternoon.
Regards,
Steven
I read Steven's comment am distressed at its tone. But, as we see in so much of modern culture, only so much can survive in the long run. That which is good, which is appreciated, which is enjoyed will survive. The rest, the hundreds of books, songs, paintings, movies, TV and radio shows, and trillions of bits from this thing we call 'The Internet' will all be afterthoughts.
What the Internet has done, and weblogs have done better, was make the art of human coomunication more a function of when it is digested, rather than when it is disseminated. It does not matter when or where something was posted. If it is useful, or enjoyable, here and now, that is when that bit of information is reality. It may have been there before. It may be there in the future. With The Internet, reality indeed is only a function of perception. Its spatiality is the distance between the eye and the brain; its temporality is the time it is in one's thoughts. Only those idea which can break this 'instantiation' will survive. This will be one of the legacies of the weblog.
Disclaimer: having worked on cSpacer, I'm biased on the subject of spatiality. However, if we acknowledge the possibility of non-Cartesian frameworks for space and time, many vistas await exploration.
Re: Steven's comment
All digital-media artifacts may perish, but even the most minute will influence the geneaological essence of future historians.
A media artifact is incarnated in a sequence-moment, possibly identified by, but not limited to: Gregorian calendar slot, GPS coordinate, IP address, MT posting ID, disk partition inode, google pagerank for artifact title, google-snapshot ID, USD serial numbers in distribution, ratio of living to once-living cloned sheep, total miles driven by mercedes cars in postal codes where household income is below the national poverty line, number of posts in the song/commercial thread, etc.
This notion of space is intensely personal, since the near-random coordinates of the last paragraph have unpredictable emotional outcomes when 'performed' by a sensing brain.
Inter-moment metrics (e.g. "distance" or "time") are emotional. What does a single note contribute to a musical composition? How is a single note's freedom of expression constrained by audience requirements for emotional (BOO!) continuity?
A biological virus may wipe out all paper records or their page-binding glue. Women may use genetic engineering to stop having sons, on the grounds that men have a poor track record in foreign policy. Many paths are possible, but know that sequence matters. Each node makes an emotional and geneaological contribution.
Babies are proxy keyboards for data entry into environments yet-to-be-defined. At the same time, babies are nano-goop, instantiating identity from a never-before-existent environment, drawn to experiences that resonate with their genetic destiny. Their environments are shaped by our media artifacts.
The future is sufficiently confusing to provide both despair and hope. And weblogs have their place in this history. Happy New Moment everyone.
A comment on Rick's comment :)
It seems unlikely to me that such temporal or spacial order can be preserved or be decoded, or if decoded be considered reliable, one hundred years hence.
Imagine yourself for a moment a historian of the twentieth century set the task of understanding the contents of a building full of punched tape or a warehouse of collation cards with little surviving working equipment or documentation.
As formidable as that task may seem you will have have a greater chance of success than if you were presented with today's compactness and "evaporating" magnetic media or fragile optical media. This is not simply for the volume involved, which will under the best of circumstances present a challenge - but simply because the survival of it all depends on the copy operation. This operation, necessary for survival and repeated over a century, will destroy any notion of location or time.
Regards,
Steven
... the survival of it all depends on the copy operation. This operation, necessary for survival and repeated over a century, will destroy any notion of location or time.
It's not easy, but a metadata standard for long-term archival is being developed.
Before there were persistent media, there were storytelling traditions for oral transmission. Perhaps our new oral traditions will involve file-format hacking, timeline reconstruction, reverse-engineering and questions like "Was that before or after the crash?"
For physical media, Usenet's restoration depended on distributed, redundant archives kept by a handful of individuals. As yet, we don't know what will do the same for web discussions.