tagging

In my Visual Narrative course on Tuesday, Lane showed us this demo of Photosynth. It's an amazing piece of software (still a few versions before beta) that does, I think, what Weinberger is talking about. The presenter talks about the assembling of meta-data that is "greater than the sum of its parts" and from that assemblage is produced a new version of our "collective memory."

I admit that I am pretty taken by the idea of shared memory/shared meta-data. Yes, there is a level of utopianism that I'm drawn in by, but it feels like the right move. This collectivity gets at some of my initial concerns about blogs, which for me epitomize the glut of information that seems impossible to sift through and that is therefore scary. The ways we are developing to classify and filter ALL this data is really powerful. In the past I've felt hamstrung by the fact that there was just too much to look at, too much to take in. How do we cut this stuff down? I really think Weinberger's ideas hold promise.

Anne has asked a couple of times about the differences between blogging and traditional response papers. It has certainly been different for me, but I've been unable to articulate why. At the end of the text, Weinberger says that "in conversation we think out loud together, trying to understand" (203). This sums up my feelings on blogging for this class. I feel like we're all conversing in a way that just wouldn't happen otherwise, even if we all read everyone's traditional response paper or uploaded them to D2L. "Knowledge--its content and its organization--is becoming a social act" (133).

I apologize for trying to shoehorn space into all of my blogs, but... Weinberber points out that, "tags may become more useful, meaningful, relevant, and clearer the more there are" (168). I'm struck by the similarity in reasoning to the modernist architect Le Corbusier and his feelings on density, which are something along the lines of: the solution to city's problem of density is more density! While I don't necessarily agree with his argument in regards to livability, I think the underlying drive to both of their statements is very similar. And while schemes based on hyperdensity were virtually all disasters, his thinking was revolutionary. Maybe Corbu was just 80-or-so years too early with his thinking.

So what happens when we push this way of reconnecting the world, the meta-verse, to its limits? Personally, I'm fascinated about the physical implications. Everything Weinberger talks about is in regards to the assemblage of digital information. If tagging and meta-data are the holy grail of information, I have a hard time believing that the physical world will be content in existing in the Dewey Decimal format. He talks about bar codes and RDF tags, but is there someplace between these and the fantasy of Rainbows End that could coalesce into a "meta-space?"