To continue my earlier post on blogging and JL Austin's theory of speech acts...
To scandalously summarise Austin: it is one thing to read (or hear) the utterance 'it's going to rain', and quite another to understand it as a forecast, a guess, a warning, or a decision that a game of tennis needs to be called off. How the utterance is to be understood (its 'illocutionary force') depends, loosely, on its context--not just in the sense of taking into account the utterances that precede and follow it, but also on who the speaker is, what conventional role he is assuming (e.g. a weather forecaster), the occasion (is the forecaster just guessing when chatting to a friend, or is he announcing his official forecast on TV?), and other factors.
To go back my older theme of linking and content, you could say that a disaggregated, isolated piece of content is like an utterance without its illocutionary force (a mere 'locution', in Austin's parlance). An attributed, branded piece has more illocutionary force, but not quite as much as when it is placed in the bundle (or aggregate) for which it was intended - e.g. a weather forecast is truly official when it is part of, e.g., a news bulletin (Jaron Lanier recently made a related point - see my post on this).
So far so good. About what follows I'm far less clear.
It seems as if the web, with its hyperlinks, has the effect of destabilizing the illocutionary force of content. This is partly because of disaggregation - i.e. because content can be found in isolation, outside the bundles (e.g. a weather site) for which it is produced. But another, more mysterious effect seems to be at play as well. By linking to someone else's disaggregated utterance I am, in some vague way, setting the illocutionary force in which that utterance will be taken.
Perhaps illocutionary force is not the appropriate concept here. Value might be a more appropriate concept - i.e. when I link I make a value statement about what I link to - but this will not do: not all linking is a matter of recommendation; when I link to something I may not be implying that the linked-to content is 'good', or even that you might 'like' it (an interesting word). I may instead be providing evidence ('go see for yourself') or trying to help you discover or find something. And what am I valuing, the content or its author? Relevance might seem to be a better concept.
An unrelated point: To an extent, this is not new to the web. When I review a film, or when I quote someone else, I am somehow setting the context in which the referred-to content will be received (Peter Morville makes a similar point, albeit in a somewhat different context: "when considering a decision, we are unduly influenced by the first information we find"). But hyperlinks are somehow different. This may be to do with immediacy--referencing and referred-to content are consumed in quick succession.
No answers and little clarity. This is work in progress.
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