Weinberger says that "And we college students had it right. We were just ahead of our time. The best digital strategy is to dump everything into one large miscellaneous pile and leave it to the machines to find exactly the table setting we need for tonight's dinner." This quote matches with web 2.0 because it is all about information flow. That is what was so monumental and continues to be monumental about the internet. It is a constant flow of linked in words and pictures that flow seamlessly and endlessly among one another. According to the Web 2.0 article there are more than 9.5 million citations in Google. That is a TON of referencing and books/scholarly journals etc. getting on the web. Web 2.0 states, "Google, by contrast, began its life as a native web application, never sold or packaged, but delivered as a service, with customers paying, directly or indirectly, for the use of that service....it was just a massively scalable collection of commodity PCs running open source operating systems."
This is why google succeeded so well and why others like Netscape failed, because they wanted to control the market and jack up prices.
The internet has to be classified some way and we do it through a sorting program like Google which links keywords. These classifications are political because the person who controls the means of classification controls the whole system. Weinberger stated that when we try to 'organize' our systems and plug things into boxes that match, we will inevitably leave out more than we include. He mentioned cupcakes and hard candy as dessert, but now you have eliminated carbs. This is where tags let us bridge the gap and simultaneously labels both. In Web squared they touched on collective intelligence and how it leads to, "“crowdsourcing,” meaning that a large group of people can create a collective work whose value far exceeds that provided by any of the individual participants." Weinberger mentioned he see's this as the end of gate keeping, or the filtering of 'slush' that is considered unworthy. I would argue that as we move forward there will be different web locations for the 'slush'. There are now, we have good wordpress blogs, and bad wordpress blogs. This is determined by you. It doesn't mean we can delete them off of the internet, but we will probably choose to stop reading them. Its like someone on the side of the road protesting and yelling. You will probably walk away, they still may be there, and garner negative attention, but the very idea of crowd sourcing means you must interact with peers to gather intelligent thought. So they will stand as islands of one. I would argue that among the generations my age now that myspace has become 'slush' there is a collective intelligence at work that ended their success. Why? We probably could break it down, but the point is at some time, the majority stopped crowdsourcing myspace.
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While I think it’s very true that the internet allows for many more people’s ideas to make it out into the wide world than would have been possible before, we should be wary of idealizing its openness. While it allows many of the little guys to be heard, it also means that the big guys with the means and the desire can work the system to their advantage. After all advertisers wouldn’t waste money on web advertising or viral marketing without a reasonable expectation of being able to tweak the interests of the net to their advantage. Take for example large companies who can afford to hire people to write seemingly genuine, glowing posts about their products in every corner of the web. The unappealing protester, with the right resources can still make ripples in the digital world, so we should try to be savvy about when we’re being had. And what we decide is slush or not may be influenced by those with $omething to gain.
ReplyDeleteI think it's interesting how Weinberger mentions crowd sourcing as an end to gatekeeping. In reality, just about every TV show, every song, every word that can't be broadcasted on the radio, or cable, can be watched or heard on the internet. There are no gatekeepers deciding what goes on the internet and what doesn't. Any individual can put whatever the heck they want on the internet, and all I have to say is I hope it stays this way because some countries don't have the same luxuries like we do in the U.S!
ReplyDeleteNeal Stephenson was interested enough in the concept of internet denizens who do nothing but meta-filter the data coming through the nets that he wrote a couple of books that were more or less entirely about them. Snow Crash and The Diamond Age both explore the secret lives of individuals who live and die on the consequences of shifting demand for data.
ReplyDeleteOne man's slush is another man's treasure - Weinberger's got it right. There is no way to cherry-pick information - everything is important to somebody. Even spam can tell us something about commercial development - by tracking keywords on archive copies of blacklisted pages, we know who was most interested in being seen when and even what kind of money they were willing to pay to get it.
I really liked your mentioning of classifying the Internet. Because, really, the World Wide Web is going to keep exponentially expanding that soon data will be lost among all the other new data. Classifying the the Internet, whether by Google or a new search engine that comes around, is going to keep being an essential part of it. If the world starts to lax on it, the Internet may jump back to its Netscape days (not that it would ever would). All I'm saying is this constant classifying of information, like tagging, needs to remain a priority.
ReplyDeleteYour idea of the "constant flow" of the Internet is definitely one of the connections between readings. The heart of it, then, is how this flow is different than before, and what we (should) do with it. One man's slush is definitely another man's treasure, thus the long tail. Nice post overall.
ReplyDeletethis idea of classifications being political is really interesting. We organize information on the web based on a system of rules that were previously addressed. I thought about your post for a while and I started about thinking how the internet platform as a whole could be challenged by some other virtual space that lends itself better to newer forms of classification. A internet 2.0
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