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.
Filed under: booklists, disorder, information culture, information theory, noise
so here is yet another installment of my booklists. i have been mulling over issues of disorder and noise over the past summer, looking mainly to literature in information theory and postmodern theories which has helped to contextualize things for me, but i have been horribly dissatisfied with translating these issues into the digital information landscape.
cybernetic information theory feels inappropriate for so many reasons: a hyperlinear model of communication (sender-receiver), an emphasis on transmission to the detriment of meaning, and systems framework that is too teleological in its orientation. my emphasis on noise and disorder is predicated on an assumption that there is an aspect of networked digital practice is predicated on fun, play, chaos, sillyness…and unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a lot of good frameworks and theories that address this dimension.
i started thinking about problems of information overload to try and tap into a body of literature that would bring me closer to other dimensions of messiness and was initially disappointed as the term itself –information overload– has been used primarily by those in the information systems management literature that, again, conceive of information use and practice in relation to defined tasks and goals.
it seems that there is a growing body of work that looks at play and fun in digital culture, but what about boredom? as someone who is interested in digital practice and everyday life, how do we begin to conceptualize those quiet boring moments that make up the crux of our lives? what does being bored mean and look like now? is this different than previously? this line of questioning led me directly to Overload and Boredom by Orrin Klapp. I haven’t read it, but I’m damn excited to. I’m not quite sure what the relationships are between the disorder, noise, boredom, and banality, but there is something there….
i have been doggedly reading through such a myriad of texts these days. there’s something to be said about waking up at 10:30am, making a cup of tea, and slowly plodding through a big stack of books without imminent pressure on time. it’s all quite luxurious. UCLA is on a quarter system and a 11 week term is ridiculously hectic. it feels like mental and logistical sprinting for 9 months straight and so i’m more than happy to take things quietly right now before i fully ramp up again in september. i’ve been going out (gasp) and hanging with family and friends more than my workaholic usualness. oh yeah, i also pimped out my bike and have been seriously tooling around LA on my bike which has been so mega-awesome. LA isn’t the most bike friendly place and so find myself duking it out with pedestrians for sidewalk real estate, but needless to say, i can understand now why dogs stick their heads out of car windows. i also learned that i still know how to pop a wheelie and bike with no hands. so ha.
a lot of my reading so far have meandered quite a bit. i started out thinking i was going to bone up on all the po-mo lit, but that has since evolved into information theory, literary criticism, and STS work in classification. the main point of all this has been to try and think about various metaphors to describe tagging systems. understanding my own information flux i was really intrigued with notions of noise to describe the ongoing and circuitous flow of information in my daily life and weirdly enough i just came across a posting from alice marwick that expresses those same sentiments. when looking at tagging more specifically, i was always struck by just how noisy these systems were. i mean, it’s like a big “miscellaneous” heap as David Weinberger would say. alice takes on this is a rather optimistic spin on the medium is the message, or rather that flux and noise are the message.
i’m a bit more ambivalent about this. i don’t think it’s necessarily about being a good or bad thing. instead, i think that this is a shift in how we look out and into the world, which in turn shapes how we sense and construct ourselves. when i think about tagging in relation to information infrastructures, tagging systems (including the ways in which we opt to describe ourselves social networking sites because they are essentially discrete terms in some simplistic “this is who i am” schema”) seem to operate like some kind of informational exoskeleton that braces our digital selves. and so rather than supporting from within, much like a brace, these systems awkwardly and uncomfortably hold things together from the outside. the inherent chaos that comes from flux-driven noise lends itself to this kind of awkward piecing together.
i certainly believe that there is an inherent beauty to chaos and noise, after all most innovation, creativity, and imagination have their origins in the previously unknown and unconnected. however i think there are some serious implications for how we manage the noise and thus the meaning of the noise. if noise and flux are meaningful purely within their own terms, this kind of self-referentiality is kind of depressing.
anyhow, an update for fall: i will be presenting at 4S in Montreal and then schlepping off to Vanouver for AOIR. all this is gonna happen within a week of each other. yipes! i’m hosting a panel, with my friend katie shilton at 4S titled “Technologies of Forgetting and Exclusion: Case Studies in the Social Benefits of Forgetting” where i’ll be talking more specifically about the information tracking of sexual offenders, which if you haven’t been following, is a rather egregious example of the problems of this whole “right to know” attitude in our age of digital data capture and surveillance.
okay. need to go to bed. smell ya later.
i haven’t posted in ages as i have hermetically sealed myself off for awhile as i took some time off and started working on some writing pieces. one thing that has struck me over the past week or so as i’ve started delving more deeply into the rhetoric of web 2.0 is the lack of understanding of how individuals actually use many of these applications. i know there has been a significant interst in social networking sites as one avenue of research in this area, however if we understand web 2.0 as a series of applications that serve as inclusive platforms that facilitate participation and engagement, one thing that has struck me is how little we actually know about how the ways which people participate and engage. a lot of the cursory research operates on an ideological level that criticizes the potentially exploitative nature of these applications as ownership of this information does not necessarily rest in the hands of those who create it. i think this is most apparent in discussions of “collective intelligence” and metaphors of “hive” mind since in a hive colony there are only two status ranks: the queen and the workers.
having just read david weinberger’s “everything is miscellenous,” i was struck by how a lot of his argumentation is predicated on an *ideal* scenario of free flowing information that allows everyone’s voice to be represented; that allows for all informational needs to be fulfilled and shared. and as someone who subscribes to these ideals, i couldn’t help but react by asking myself “so is this really what’s happening? are websites like myspace, wikipedia, facebook, flickr, twitter, blogs et al creating embedded structural shifts in the traditional social and political hierarchies?” in a lot of ways, the rhetoric that surrounds the current state of social software echoes similar notions in the belief in free-market capitalism and so borrowing from economic discourse, one particular indicator of a healthy democracy is the existence of a stable and middle class…so what would a digital middle class look like? i recall a wired article a while back on some work in myspace and the music industry that put forward the idea that myspace allowed for the growth in a kind of musical middle class that destabilized the previous hierarchies in the industry that concentrated profits in the major record labels.
so from a broader web 2.0 information perspective, what would a middle class user look like? how would we know it if we saw it? would there even be much difference between the digital middle class and “non-digital” middle class? it’s still unclear what exactly this kind of groups looks and would look like as it seems as if most research has focused on heavy users as we try to understand the potential boundaries of what these technologies can do. a recent pew report providing a typology of information users had some really interesting findings about “middle of the road users” and those with few technological assets, in contrast to elite users. what i think i most interesting is the varying attitudes towards of technology across the range of users as they reflect uneven perceptions of benefits and interest. given this, i think it would be really helpful to get some kind of deep-rooted understanding of where these kinds of cleavages occurs.
as i have been slowly gearing up for my summer writing projects, i’ve been trying to wrap my head around several things. first, i had previously briefly posted about the notion of information use to begin taking a closer look at the the things that people do in relation to the ways we make meaning of our lives. how we perceive the world is often informed by how we come to know the world. so in a digital-mediated-informational world, how has this altered how we exeperience and make meaning in our day to day lives?
i’ve been busy this academic year brushing up on the old social theory literature, which can really inform these questions. one primary question in this area has got a lot of do with exploring the relationships between structures and our ability to act independently (or not) of them. stuctures entails a wide variety of things, including: cultures, institutions, hardware, economics, language, government. unfortunately, what constitutes a social structure is ofen ill defined, but it’s often posited as a curtailing force on our ability to act independently, as freely thinking agents.
while that as a rather crude overview of social theory, i’ve been reading social theory in this lens in attempts to really get at that first question about how we make meaning in our lives. if we live in a network society now, how has our day to day and experiences in the world changed since industrial life, for example? clearly not easy questions and not easy answers. so, i’m kind of at a weird point in terms of summer projects where i feel like i have to choose between navigating down a information use path or an information structures path. what’s difficult is that i strongly feel that given developments in 2-point-duh applications, there is this kind of convergence between use-and-structures; a kind of explicit rendering and embedding between the two where use constitutes structures. structures have always constituted use, but it’s this second iteration that brings it all back together and makes it so fascinating. this relates to some of my earliers posts on the collapse of production and consumption in tagging and remix more largely, where acts of remixing or tagging actually are simultaneous instances of producing and consuming information.
anyhow, i will have to make a decision at some point and decide on what direction i need to go as it will require steeping my nose in books for the summer…that is, in between barbequing, reading fiction, travelling, napping, and being lazy. 
the summer is looking up to be a really great. as i’m slowly finishing the last to-do’s for the quarter, there are several writinig projects i will be working on, one of which will be a literature review the combines the sociology of culture (or a post-modern sociology of culture) literature with the informtion structure and information organization literatures. if anyone has suggestions for these, that would be so absolutely lurvely! i probably will end up spending a good chunk of time trolling the UCLA library website and meandering through the dusty stacks, but any pointers would be a wonderful help.
Filed under: information culture
so i just got back from ICA, which was in san francisco this year, and had a whopping good time. never mind the good vibes i got just from being back on home turf and seeing old friends, but overall i met great people, had great conversations, and ate good food. being at the conference, there were definitely some strong themes running through the conference, one of which was “participatory culture” and everybody’s favorite buzzword web 2.0. i find it especially interesting to here debates on these topics from in the communications and media disciplines, as they carry absolutely different tones than in the data-information-ese, with strong social theoretical (one of my faves) and philosophical framings.
as partipation and participatory culture becomes increasingly latched on to, it was interesting to hear people finally begin to move away from the uber-utopian visions (read: technological deterministic. boo!) and begin to consider the possible drawbacks and barriers on the horizon. there were ample discussions on IP and copyright and i was quite pleased to hear several discussions on media literacy and education in this new space. fred turner from stanford had raised some really interesting points about disjuctions of participation and free labor while companies (like an unnamed search company) “participate” their way to wall street. i recently pointed out to a friend of mine that for most of these web 2.0 sites, when you upload content, you inadvertently have uploaded your property rights as well [aside: boo to that i say. but yet that doens't stop me from doing it. hmmmm.]. anyhow, so amidst this flurry of talk of participation and engagement, particularly in relation to literacy, this really got me thinking about just how little we know and understanding about the creative processes of *producing* culture.
when we start talking about remix and cultural adaptation, a lot of this is predicated on the reproducibility of content. this idea is not new, so i won’t belabor it. but it’s important to start from here, only because it’s really uncomfortable to really have discussions about information and media consumtion AND production as separate processes. and if i recall correctly, a lot of our previous theoretical understandings of culture and media is predicated on a distinction between these two, as fully separate processes. axel bruns has coined terms like “produsers” and “produsage” where describes the intertwining of production and consumption in a participatory framework. some of my previous postings on tagging touch upon this issue. but i strongly feel that users produce new meaning by reframing, providing new readings of digital text and content, and thus creating new cultural forms. in the example of tags, the act of tagging alone is a meaning-making process. in the example of suggested tags, it’s interesting to think about the individual and the collective intersect.
however, in the current stage of internet development, we have this kind of hyperreproducability, that while Baudrillard and Francfort School assailed, i really believe that the new rhetoric around participation and participatory culture and the kinds of things we see happening require use to reconfigure this whole theoretical space because clearly, we are NOT wholly dominated by the media industries. we are no all cultural lemmings and people do awesome, interesting, quirky things with these communication tools that fundamentally resist and challenge this notion of a monolithic and hegemonic media structure. so how can we explain this, in spite of the continuation, exaggeration, and of reproduction?
i think the answer lies somewhere in an understanding of the processes of creativity. while people at ICA were flirting with this notion, no one seemed to explicitly interested in this, per se. there was a lot of talk of human action that was politically framed, i.e. in terms of resistance primarily, but being a political actor is but one role we play during the course of our everyday. that being said, a focus specifically on creative dimensions of practice accounts for a lot of the agency that i’m always trying to find, but also across the multiple dimensions of our lives, both as public and private individuals. people are creative in their self expression. people are creative in the ways the resist cultural infrastructure. people are creative in their ability to read between the lines of political rhetoric. i think a lot of the discourse on participatory media underscores this notion of creativity, but given the intertwining of publicness and privateness in digital practice, it just seems that so many of our theoretical understandings of agency are really bad at taking into account the fuzziness of this distinction.
I tag. Voraciously. I visit my del.icio.us account several times a day and it’s starting to get to the point, where I turn to my del.icio.us account more so than google when I am searching for things. As I have started to think about tagging more, I’ve become struck by several characteristics of the acts of tagging itself.
From a general view, I have a sinking suspicion that a lot of the discourse surrounding “information” is devoid of any kind of political economy framework, i.e a consideration of the processes of consumption and production and the power dynamics at play. Don’t get me wrong, there are people who are considering these processes in related avenues, but they typically situate themselves in the media or new media discourse. That being said, it seems that tagging represents a new kind of collapse between consumption and production. While I don’t think this view is entirely original…I think a lot of the rhetoric surrounding “user-generated content” more generally is based on the view of enabling users of content to now be producers of content. What I think is particularly interesting in tagging is the simultaneity of consumption and production; that in the single act of tagging you are simultaneously consuming information and producing information. Metaphors of re-mix abound in these discussions, but it’s important to note that re-mix, from a music point of view, still kept the distinctions between consumption and production in tact.
I think part of this collapse simultaneity then is related to the purely symbolic domain of tagging, as it stands currently. Tagging so far has been implemented solely in the digital space, with reference solely to digital materials.
From a network perspective, tagging starts with the self and the ego, generating social benefits and collective knowledge in a kind of accidental-externalistic fashion, rather than from a purely altruistic one. This recent blog post on the differences between tagging in amazon and librarything discuss the importance of tagging of your own use rather than tagging for everyone else. So, as an extension of the ego network, tagging begins to operate like some kind of symbolic free market, but with consumers and producers coupled as one.
Filed under: information culture
in my bourdieu seminar today i had a vague epiphany about a lot of the discussions on social software environment. one of the ever elusive dialectics in social theory concerns the ongoing relationship between structre and agency; that is, how much of our decisions, and actions can be attributed to social, institutional structures versus our own volition and choice?
i got to thinking a bit and it seems that a lot of the current discussion surrounding social software (and a lot of the hype surrounding web 2.0 in general) is contingent on privileging individual action, in the spirit of “openness” and freedom. while i’m not opposed to these as values that we should stive towards however, this view has always made me a little uncomfortable it assumes that all of us using “social software” and “web 2.0″ tools as black-boxed agents.
while social scientists and philosophers still have not fully figured out this relationship between social structures and human agency in other domains (you have people on all accounts asserting one over the other, or trying to empirically measure how they interact with one another), nevertheless i think this view is particularly compelling within current digital culture as a lot of the rhetoric surrounding it tends to collapse the two altogether. i mean what does the “social”in social software really mean? does social in this way just mean an aggregation of individuals?
to stick my neck out there and offer my two cents: the social dimension of social software couples individual action and social structure, in a way that individual agency is reified…i mean, we’re still talking about ego networks here right? this still leaves that social question unanswered….there just seems to be this weird collapse of the two that’s still unclear to me. i feel that a lot of the current work in social networks and network theory more broadly is trying to get at this question…any answers?
so i read this post on lifehack about granularity as a strategy for organization and work and was struck by it just sounded a new term for good planning and organization skills. over time, as i’ve grown through my career, having to take charge of more responsibilities and even having to boss people around, the particular skill of being able to look ahead at the top of hill and break things down into manageable chunks is a real necessity. this kind of granularity as they describe it sounds very “managerial-ese” in some respects…can any MBAers out there tell me if there is unit in your project management class on modularity or granularity?
anyhow, so i think it’s pretty naive to think that one can just bulldoze and muscle their way through any given task. but what’s interesting in this post is how organizational skills are cast specifically in terms of granularity which just seems kind of odd to me. i think concepts of modularity are pretty key in the digital landscape and i have previously argued on several occasions that modularity is one of the new defining characteristics of today’s information culture, however this post made me rethink this postion. modularity, bricolage, “mash-up”, re-mix, collage — all of these terms suggest the same notion, however is there thing different between the analogue and the digital versions? and what about cultural recyling then? how relevant is this concept?
