Via Nicholas Carr I have come accross Janor Lanier, who writes what I think is a superb critique of the normative ethos behind the web 2.0 movement.
The substance of Lanier's argument--an important subject in its own right, on which I may comment at some point--is not what concerms me here. What does is a series of observations he makes about content and context, a subject I have been discussing for a long time.
In a recent post I said I would start exploring, among other things, how content's meaning is related to the way in which it is aggregated; or, in my terminology, how aggregates qualify what they reference. On this Lanier has some interesting points:
When you see the context in which something was written and you know who the author was beyond just a name, you learn so much more than when you find the same text placed in the anonymous, faux-authoritative, anti-contextual brew of the Wikipedia. The question isn't just one of authentication and accountability, though those are important, but something more subtle. A voice should be sensed as a whole. You have to have a chance to sense personality in order for language to have its full meaning. Personal Web pages do that, as do journals and books. Even Britannica has an editorial voice, which some people have criticized as being vaguely too "Dead White Men."
As an example, Lanier mentions that in Wikipedia there is an entry on him (which he constantly erases, only to be restored by someone else) that describes him as a film director, even though he only made an 'awful' experimental film fifteen years ago. That Wikipedia entry, he claims, is meaningless in disaggregated form. However, "if an ironic Web site devoted to destroying cinema claimed that I was a filmmaker, it would suddenly make sense. That would be an authentic piece of text. But placed out of context in the Wikipedia, it becomes drivel."
As a whole, I think Lanier's argument is somewhat confused; he conflates the perils of disaggregation with those of machine-aggregated group-think, which are really two different things. Still, his piece is full of gems like the ones above. I recommend it to anyone who is intrested in this blog.
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