Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Blog #6: Convergence vs. the Third Order

Jenkins' introduction is about the various ways our media is changing. The way we access it, what it means to us, the services we use, and the conglomeration of multiple media are all topics he covers. His take-home point is that businesses need to learn to keep up or face "declining goodwill and diminished revenues."

There are many implications in the digital age for what both Jenkins is talking about. Almost all of the media, services, content that Jenkins refers to can and is digitized. Video, images, text, conversation, and more can be converted into a digital form and let loose into the world of the Third Order of Order. There may be no unifying device, or "black box" that all of the media is centralized through, but there is a central platform that all of it is stored on, a central source that more and more devices are able to access. That platform is the home of the Third Order, the internet. Cell phones, computers, game consoles, and the giant stack of black boxes Jenkins refers to can mostly all interface with the internet. More consistently today the services of yesterday are being hosted online and streamed to the world.

A statement Jenkins makes near the end caught my eye, and it would probably give Weinberger a fit. "There will
be no magical black box that puts everything in order again" (24). If everything is miscellaneous, the idea of a black box should never be to put everything in order. Weinberger might argue that this convergence our culture is experiencing would benefit from being miscellanized, let loose on the internet to be tagged, reordered, and subject to the Third Order. Essentially while companies are trying to keep up with the ways media is converging, they might consider the miscellaneous and not amalgamation into a single black box.

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Blog #5: using the implicit

What Weinberger is trying to say on page 170 is that there is an intangible, extraordinary amount of implicit meaning that we all depend on and take for granted. For yet another example, knowing what a book is requires you have basic understandings of the publishing system, human activity, information distribution, the act of writing, and a whole bunch of other things that aren't necessarily obvious. How this relates to bits and digital data is that when a humongous volume of digital information is collected, there is a lot of implicit meaning to derive from that data. When humans collectively contribute to something, purposefully or otherwise, a whole lot of data is accumulated. Weinberger's point is essentially that this data can be used by whoever has access to derive implicit meanings and make use of them. The example he provided is that when a store clerk digitized her logbook, she could see a whole lot more implicit meanings that weren't available in the paper form, like certain periods of time where milk and beer sold more often than others. This was possible because the level of control we have over ordering our digital content is greater than physical content. And we can make algorithms that draw on data in different ways to make new meanings. Weinberger's example of that is the idea of a computer finding out where an arts festival is not because it's tagged with the location but because it shares similar metadata with other websites that do contain locational metadata, and it draws implicit meaning from tag associations (such as golden gate bridge with sf and california).

The song I chose was Why Worry by Dire Straits.

Saturday, February 12, 2011

February 10th "Tweet"

I didn't want to limit myself to 160 simple characters but I don't want to do a ridiculously critical write-up either when the original assignment was a twitter post anyway. So here are my slightly-less-abridged three-main-points of Weinberger:
  • The Web and digital data in general has some serious epistemological considerations for us all
  • The physical world is limited; the digital world virtually limitless. He presents a dichotomy throughout about the digital "world" versus the physical world, limitations, possibilities.
  • The power of this new connectivity of the third order of order is in our hands. So is the responsibility.
That's my take on it. Sorry you couldn't just get away with a 160 character tweet. #dtc356.

Blog #4: metadata meet web 2something

Weinberger's basically been a big Web 2.0 Propagandist to this point as far as I'm concerned. He's constantly making references to the big-name web-based companies that have been associated with "web 2.0" principles since the buzz-word was first used. Flickr, Delicious, eBay, Google, Amazon, Apple, Wikipedia, he's referencing them with every step he makes, and these are the big online entities that have been tagged (no pun intended) as "Web 2.0" proprietors. His profession that data isn't limited, its duplicity and the relevance to tagging is also talked about, and with the same reverence, in O'Reilly's article. Points that both O'Reilly and Weinberger both discuss include but are not limited to:

  • The complexity of the web and its structure
  • How large corporations are revolutionize the way we've done things in the past
  • The changing politics of knowledge- how its users are gaining importance and experts are losing ground
  • How every individual is responsible for adding value

In several cases the examples they use are the same: iTunes changing the structure of music, Wikipedia's users making it more valuable than traditional encylopedias, companies using users to make more profit, and Amazon's recommendations exposing new ways to buy things.

Where they differ should also be noted. O'Reilly was discussing the web in relation to itself as they very title suggests. It's not just the web, it's Web 2.0, or its Web squared.. O'Reilly's point was that the Web is improving and changing business and the social world. Weinberger isn't just discussing the web; he's discussing far more epistemological implications about organization, our worldview, and categorization. Weinberger's book is far more comprehensively approaching our society and how it organizes things. He looks not only at the Web and how its getting better or revolutionizing business, but how it is different from the physical world and the way we have organized things before the web existed. This is not a primary consideration of O'Reilly's, who focused mostly on the development of the Web and the development of it for fiscal purposes.

Blog #3: Slicing up reality

Well, pertaining to the ways of organize music, that can refer to a number of things. Perhaps this is another blaring example of reality being multi-faceted, but does organization of my music collection mean what arbitrary buzz-word categories (read: Genres) all my music fits into, or how I personally arrange and mark it for listening? I guess there are some pluralities between the two distinctions that apply to both. Like Weinberger said, we try to split things all the time. For example the terrible loaded question: "what kind of music do you listen to?" That question is essentially saying "what label can I apply to your entire musical identity?" Or Weinberger might rephrase it as "what branches is your music on?" Anyway, I'll try and discuss both here.

I generally dislike the idea of genres when it comes to music. Genres are great for movies; there's usually some kind of consensus on them: comedies seek to entertain through humor, romances focus on relationships, there's not a lot of confusing, arbitrary terminology. However when people craft such terms as "post-punk with w-bit influences" I get really confused. What is punk? What does it mean to be post-punk? What does 8-bit have to do with anything? It gets worse the more you add: post-black melodic grndcore egyptian speed death metal. I guess I don't understand why the use of arbitrary words when you can just throw down a couple adjectives and call it good? I don't see the need to say that an album is "alt-folk contemporary indie rock" when I can say that it combines modern sensibilities of  recording with laid-back acoustic melodies, upbeat singing, and some orchestral integration. And then there's the issue of artists that mix it up with a whole host of influences and do a different thing with each song or even within songs. This genre-based thinking is too compartmentalized for me; I just feel more free without deciding that I need to neatly file all 3000 songs I listen to into nicely labeled boxes.

For a little more prompt-relevance: I guess I've met a lot of people who like to organize their music this way. They do it so much that they even like to put it into the song's metadata. They use genres to arrange and listen to their music, because they have enough of it that's so incredibly similar that it fits into those boxes and they listen for the telltale signs of certain genres in their music for the sake of compartmentalizing it in that way. Whereas I just have it divided by artist, album, year, and track wherever I can to create groupings; they'll add the additional trait of genre and do that.

The other aspect of organizational is the more direct aspect of how exactly I have it stored on my hard drive and how exactly I access it. I have an XML spreadsheet of my library that stores info about where all my songs are and tags their metadata. I use a central program to read this spreadsheet and arrange my tracks based off of the metadata. When I click play, it uses the XML spreadsheet to locate the file and then plays it. I like this method but unfortunately unless I preserve the XML spreadsheet (which I've never had the foresight to do), little, it any of the metadata is stored in songs themselves so I lose most of it with each format or machine switch. One day I'll probably switch from iTunes to Foobar and just use a format that can store metadata.

Blog #2: Chapters 1 and 2

To me, the main point Weinberger is trying to make is that we have exited the realm of the physical, the paper medium. Atoms are limited; digital organization is better in every way. "We can confront the miscellaneous directly in all its unfulfilled glory" (22) is sort of the thesis of the first chapter in that it revels in the miscellany of the new digital order. It praises the digital and how being miscellaneous is better than the limited structures of organization we used previously. Digitized access to things makes for a far more wholesome experience when it comes to the hunt for information. The third order of order removes the barriers we've seen previously.

One thing that I've personally pulled lots of hairs out over keeping organized is my music library. I've labored away so many tedious hours of my life making sure I have incredible, instant, and very "third-order" access to my own musical collection. Interestingly enough, while the physical medium may have been almost completely phased out by the "beauty" of the digital that Weinberger is so quick to put on a pedestal, it has so many issues. The biggest qualm I've had with the replacement of physical data with digital data is that the platform we access and centralize our digital data with, the computer, is very unstable. Far, far too many times has some virus, upgrade, server failure, or other issue with the inherent fragility of computers caused me to lose access to my entire collection of music. Viruses rendering my system unstable cause me to format my hard drive, bam there goes my music. Getting a new laptop for my birthday causes the issue of having to transfer 17 GB of data, re-organize and re-sync it with an entirely new machine. The unfortunate reality of iTunes is that it tends to format files so that they don't take their metadata with them from place to place unless you continue to use iTunes, etc. etc. I could discuss the merits of various music players at length but that's irrelevant; I've unfortunately coordinated my entire music library around the familiar iTunes platform and that makes it a gigantic pain to move digital data from machine to machine, hard drive wipe to hard drive wipe. Especially when the alternative is to re-rip over 100 different CDs and deal with tagging metadata on all of it. It's quite a pain.

Thus the physical realm, with its limitations, has its advantages. Though Weinberger argues up a good storm for bits vs. atoms, I'm likened to the discussions in my DTC 375 class of the advent of the camera and how there was quite a movement around it. The idea was floating around that it was this new way to capture reality far better than paintings or art ever could and that art was thus invalidated; but it remains. As do our physical libraries and CD collections. Data is not the king, even in all the glory of the "unfulfilled glory" of the miscellaneous. 

Sorry it's late!

I understand the repercussions but my Weinberger book just came in on thursday and by this point I've only got half of it read. I hope to finish it this weekend; the accompanying blog posts will shortly follow!