Basically what I got out of the reading was that the philosophers example about the hammer. If you didn't know what the hammer was used for, you wouldn't know its meaning. Also he talks about its relationship to wood, trees, all the way up to the sun. To the sound it makes when hitting a nail to how humans need it to build and are not gods. He makes it very clear that to understand the hammer, you have to understand much much more. And what Weinberger is trying to say is that all the implied meanings that we put on the web and all the relationships/tagging, gives our world meaning.
This is related to the third order in that we are giving more information, more relationships, more insight to the web. We can't just look at dictionary.com anymore for meanings, we can look elsewhere, to blogs, articles, photos, even youtube clips. Basically we are not limited to one source, to one type of meaning, we have everyone pitching in to help each other.
Mobb Deep - back at you
Thinking about what you’re saying about everyone pitching in to help expand meanings in the third order makes me wonder about how we decide on meanings and what is meaningful. Like how “D’oh” has its own place in the Merriam Webster dictionary now (although my spell checker still doesn’t recognize it). It’s a totally made-from-scratch word, and yet most people in the US would recognize it and understand its meaning. It wasn’t created by the “masses” but it was certainly popularized by them.
ReplyDeleteAnd considering tagging and implicit meaning; what about when certain meanings are selected to be more true and accurate than others? If enough people tag things with their opinions will we end up with one digital consensus reality? Or many of them? One for everyone as Weinberger seems to suggest?
Meh, this sort of wandered off on an odd tangent. Your song map is interesting. I get some of the ideas, but a lot seems to remain as implicit suggestions of meaning.
I think that is the heart of Wikipedia, not one person just deciding what is meaningful, but a bulletin board of collaboration that is being re-worked and re-edited for further clarity and argument. I guess the 800 certified users are those that are allowed to add new posts and so i wonder what criteria they are held to? That would be interesting to know the level of diversity behind who decides what information is important
ReplyDeleteHeidegger's hammer example seemed pretty overblown to me at first, but after thinking about it, if you were coming from a perspective of knowing absolutely nothing about hammers, people, wood, nails, etc. then you would need to know that humans are incapable of driving nails with their minds or constructing whole buildings out of fundamental matter with their will alone in order to understand what the point of a hammer is.
ReplyDeleteI think the computer that wants to understand why your song has meaning to you has a similar hurdle to cross - it doesn't even know what a person or a song is, let alone why the two might connect.
Your explanation about the third order of order makes a lot of sense. We really can't just look at a dictionary anymore to find meanings. We as a culture come up with new words every day, especially as the web grows, and collaboration becomes easier and easier.
ReplyDeleteYou say, "We can't just look at dictionary.com anymore for meanings, we can look elsewhere, to blogs, articles, photos, even youtube clips." That's definitely part of the connection (and I like your angle on this). The other thing to remember is the power of tagging, of making the implicit explicit. So meaning goes 2 ways, us searching, and us tagging.
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