The evolution of the Internet as collective, public dream via electronic interfaces, and the evolution of human beings into civilizations, has many striking parallels. The earliest networks were often protected by their owners, and communities were relatively secretive or ?cave-dwelling.? The wiki, on the other hand, is out in the open field, where its vulnerability is on display and under attack. The process of its growth resembles agriculture and farming more than anything else.
In a certain sense then, the hyperlink is an extension of the wheel, allowing the traveler to go from one location to another, while the search engine is an explorer ship with its set of built-in navigational instruments. One could say that the word-of-mouth phenomenon is recreated by blogs, and farming on virtual terrain is akin to wikis — or fertile land. —Rohit Gupta —The avatar versus the journalist: Making meaning, finding truth (Online Journalism Review)
Okay, analogies are useful. This isn’t bad, though I’m not sure that “navigation” is the best overall metaphor for working through information. Maybe the first time you find it, but I’m often not so interested in finding something for the first time than I am in finding it again months or years after I came across it for the first time. That’s when information-gathering skills really come in handy. So, to me, map-making is a more resonant meatspace term for what helps me use cyberspace effectively. Your mileage may vary.
Oh, and since I’m on a caving kick, there are a few more references to caving in this story.
“At the very moment we have finally mastered the blueprints and finished the arduous task of assembling the object described on the paper, this evil magician zaps us — causing us to forget about the blueprint and our completed labor, and leaving us convinced that the sender of the blueprint has instead actually sent the object we have constructed.”
I made a mistake in saying “sculptor”, bad analogy. I think a better example of what I’m saying (“breaking the mould”) comes from the foundry, and from the quote above from your own article. Very, very lucidly written – although I’m hardly in a position to compliment one as accomplished as yourself.
Now I’ll move on to Reddy’s article. Cheers! More ruminations later :)
Sorry, that should have been Michael Reddy. My apologies for the inaccuracy. You might be interested in this paper…
http://jerz.setonhill.edu/resources/blogtalk
But you should also read Reddy’s article directly — the above paper cites it.
Yes, it’s certainly possible to search for meaning without finding it.
Regarding your metahpor… does a sculptor use a mould? The sculptor chips away at a solid block in order to reveal a hidden form… I would expect that the sculptor’s hired assistants use molds to produce copes of the original. (Again, Reddy will give you some more good material to work with.)
I tried searching Nelson Reddy, a stranger to me, but found zip-zero-rien about him on the internet. Which brings an interesting thought to my head, since you mention meaning. Is there a difference, non-linguistically, between “finding’ meaning and “searching” meaning?
One of my intuitive notions is that our inventions, that is – machines of human artifice, are some sort of mould, like a sculptor’s mould. Once the actual structure of thought is revealed and the abstract machine of ideas in motion, and interaction with the forces around it, the mould falls away, leaving behind meaning.
We don’t know how clear we sound, for instance, until we hear an echo.
I’m very much enjoying this discussion.
It’s probably safe to say that far more people look at a map of a place than actually use that map to guide them as they visit that place. Thus, for many people, the map is the closest they will ever get to the real experience. Pushing that a bit further, the map creates an image in the beholder’s mind, and since most people who see the map will never be able to compare it to the real thing, from a certain perspective, the map holds more power than the real thing. I’m thinking of the linguist Nelson Reddy, who noted what he called “evil magic” of the human mind’s capacity to completely ignore its own effort to piece together meaning, and to instead give the impression that meaning arrives intact from the sender. Thus, we are not on a daily basis conscious of the effort we put into interpreting an idea that arrives to us via language.
Many a poet has claimed to take inspiration from nature… and many a technologist too (I seem to recall that Alexandar Graham Bell was inspired by his own study of the human ear). My training in literary criticism has conditioned me to be suspicous of any assertation that a truth or a meaning is “out there” waiting to be discovered. Literary deconstructionism encourages us to think of pretty much all structure and all meaning as being projected on the outside world. I don’t make daily decisions in my life as if deconstruction is literally true — I find the idea that meaning is discoverable to be comforting. But questioning that feeling of comfort does make for intereting late-night musing.
Dear Dennis,
Allow me to push this interesting debate further:
Is it possible that we too are (re-)discovering something that already exists or has been dormant? This is what I hinted at when I quoted Mr. Paterson’s essay entitled “Going home: Our Reformation”.
We have noticed that “soul becomes flesh” ( the development ofneurology, for instance) with discovery,so what may seem like psychogeographical constructions now will soon be seen to have architectonic qualities. Perhaps this will happen because the psychogeography of buildings and masses will be discovered.
So in a looped sense, what we think we are building, we are only discovering.
Good point, Rohit. Where I feel the metaphor breaks down is that the meatspace explorers weren’t actually creating land masses and destinations — they were discovering cultures and geographical features that were already there.
Of course the cartography createad a feedback loop — that is, people who followed maps to certain locations figured out ways to exploit the resources that were there. In a sense the representations of those distant locations and people did create destinations in the minds of people who read the maps. In a similar way, the digital images published in order to keep library patrons from handling rare books sometimes lead to more requests by people who want to handle those books.
Navigation and map-making both describe working your way around features that are already there… But it’s another thing entirely to park your vessel in the middle of the ocean and build a new island, the way you can reserve “mysite.com” and start attracting traffic.
Hi there, thanks for linking to my piece and publishing your thoughts on it.
When you say that “map-making is a more resonant meatspace term” I would like to point out that map-making is exactly what drove the Age Of Exploration, which in turn led to the development of advanced navigational instruments (these for the internet are still in a state of infancy).
Once again, cheers.