Filed under: information culture
so i haven’t posted in, like, months. from thanksgiving onward it has been an absolute blur of finals-papers-moving-christmas-family time-24 hour trip to mexico-unpacking-infinite ikea visits-assembling furniture-new quarter-phew. i have no idea how we are now closing out january with the lunar new year (i.e. Tet! yay!) coming up in two weeks. ack! my lack of blogging shouldn’t be seen as some kind of indicator of my lack of mulling. just to the contrary…i suppose that blogging is wrapped in a kind of myth of transparency, that in fact what’s on the blog is a real peek into my world. i say this only because the kinds of things i’ve been thinking about don’t feel right in a blog. at this stage in my academic life, there is a lot of pulling at random threads from far-reaching areas. since i am a mega huge fan of lists, i will attempt to these out list out (be warned these are, at best, conceptual sketches):
information consumption: particularly in relation to notions of information “seeking” or information “behaviors” or information “use”, terms that typically are used within the literature. i’ve just been struck how there is a huge void in shifting any understanding of broader information practices, particularly in the given moment that is increasingly aware of “everyday life.” notions of consumption and production are a part of tradition in Marxian or political economy tradition, however in the library information world, they seem to have a hard time thinking about this only because (i think) it’s so removed from their values and belief system. not to say that i entirely agree that the Marxian critical perspective of mass media is entirely translatable into network-new media contexts…BUT! trying to understanding consumption in these environments might help to redefine some of these theories nonetheless.
production-consumption convergence: i’ve talked about this before, name-checking axel bruns notion of ‘produsage’ (which does NOT roll off the tongue so well). really this idea is about how these conceptual distinctions don’t work so well in a participatory environment. in my recent research that takes an ethnographic approach to looking at tagging, it’s pretty evident that people are simultaneously producing and consuming information and knowledge during the tag moment. given this, it seems like there’s some kind of continuum of practice-participation-information labor implicit within this? is there an implicit political economy of tagging and social software that we are all missing here? no one seems to use that phrase anymore? i suppose it is a loaded phrase, but there seems to be a murky division (and relation) between the domains of technological production and information consumption-production that’s been itching me somehow.
aesthetic of noise in digital culture: i thought these ideas were long and buried for me, but they’re starting to resurface again. i had been toying with these ideas for awhile…burying myself in books that more or less remained “noisy” and thus meaningless. it’s starting to come together.
