Categories? by Desiree

Author David Weinberger in “Everything is Miscellaneous” discusses the three orders of orders.  The first order of things put in their places, the second order of card catalogs telling us where the things are (both orders of physical things), and a third order of bits and bytes no longer restricted by the physical.

Weinberger contends that classifications that we as humans have put on most (if not all) everything from the alphabet to the encyclopedia, books, and knowledge ultimately represent our own beliefs and how we choose to prioritize.  The problem is that because we are individuals and everyone has been brought up, taught differently etc. that it would be pretty easy to say that no one will have the same classifications.   Each thing has characteristics that overlap with other things, so that a classification that makes sense to one person makes absolutely no sense to another.

It turns out that organizing stuff just means finding it again. If you have some other means of finding it (database or some other quick way to locate) you don’t need to organize.

Does the television have classifications?  You bet.  Television has categories such as Children’s shows, Comedy, Soap Operas, Sports and Documentaries and so on.  But what happens when your idea of how a show should be categorized but is different than what the person categorizing thinks?  Yes – this is an example of everyday.  You categorize so you can find and locate what it is you are looking for exactly.  If you can’t find it then you play the guessing game and inevitably frustrates users. 

 According to Weinberger, there is only one knowledge, but many ways to understand this knowledge. Instead of giving us of a new and better way of seeing the world, the Internet is a tool that represents how we have actually wanted to see the world for some time. We are the ones responsible for having built it according to our new ideas about the world, and along the way it gained a significant amount of power that is destroying pre-existing structures.

Some discussion has lead beliefs that if more online forums were created that shared evaluations with others that some power (knowledge) would be given back to us the consumer.  Sort of like candidates in election year…they tend to listen.

Weinberger argues that metadata is really the key to solving the problem of order and classification and also celebrates ordinary people can now make and control knowledge pretty effortless.

MODERN DAY TECHNOLOGY

MODERN DAY TECHNOLOGY

By:  Jessica Whitney

 

While reading “Glut Mastering Information Through The Ages” by Alex Wright I found that it talks about three key factors that we have and is using in everyday life. The three key factors are: Evolution, Cataloging, and Networks and Hierarchies. This book clearly explains the three key factors that I listed above. It goes in great detail on how things have changed from back in the days until present. It amazes me how time has changed and how people have come a very long way with modern day technology.

Evolution is a noun that means any process of formation or growth; development. Glut is a prime example of evolution because it talks about how information started, how it has changed and how it is constantly changing. We can relate evolution back to the stone ages when things were written on stones and had to be transcribed. We can also relate evolution back to word of mouth when people had to sit down and repeat history to others the way it was told to them or the way they remembered it happening. Today’s world has come a long way from what it previously was because the world has changed in so many different ways. With modern day technology we do not have to wait for someone to sit and repeat history and events to us. We are able to go to the internet, books, magazines and more to educate ourselves on what has gone on, what is going on presently and possibly predict was is going to happen in the future. As humans we should be more than grateful for the change in evolution. Because of evolution the world is constantly growing and developing in many different ways.

 When I think of cataloging, I think of lists or records of information arranged together to provide descriptive material. For example, encyclopedias, books, journals, files, leaflets, etc. The encyclopedias, books, journals and files had to paint the picture for us because we were not there to say yes something really happened or something did not happen. Those were the sources people relied on because that is what was passed on by word of mouth. Before being brought out of the evolution and cataloging period all we had to rely on were encyclopedias, journals, files, and books to provide us with the important facts on history and other things.

 Networks and Hierarchies are where we are in today’s world. This is where the World Wide Web better known as the internet comes into play. The internet is a worldwide system of computer networks used to exchange information. People are using the internet continuously to stay informed on what is going on in the world, research history and host of other things. The internet has the capability to post all the latest information within minutes of it happening. In the evolutionary and cataloging days we would have had to wait until an updated volume was printed before acknowledging something was true. The internet is the light of the evolution world because it is modern day technology at our fingertips.

 In conclusion, I feel “Glut Mastering Information Through The Ages” is a great book because it explains the transformation of the early days to present. This book could not have been written in a better way.

Organizing Digital Information

Weinberger’s book, Everything is Miscellaneous reminds me of a conversation I had earlier this week. I was talking with an employee of an online media company about their business model. What stuck out was his answer as to why an online media company that focuses on video would have a company blog. They are providing their audience with information in the video, so what is the value of the blog? Doesn’t it just reiterate what is in the video, for example a transcript of the show, or does it provide additional information beyond what they talked about in the video?

The answer may surprise you, that the purpose of the blog is to increase traffic to the website. I am not saying that the blog is for people who prefer to read as opposed to watching a video. The purpose of the blog post is to provide additional information for search engine optimization, in other words how to reference the webpage. Search engines retrieve results through algorithms that use keywords to retrieve relevant information for a search. The problem is that search engine optimization is limited with video. Videos, along with other media objects such as pictures and soundtracks are limited to the text associated with them. In most cases, the only text that can be applied to a media object is its title, a few tags, and a short description. In many cases this is not enough information to successfully return accurate search results.

This is where a blog post comes in handy. If you embed a video onto a webpage with a blog post that is relevant to the video, you create what is known as a transmedia narrative. A transmedia narrative is another form of intertexuality, in which a media object is paired with text to create a meaningful connection. For example, lets say you are an online news show about video games. The blog post accompanying the video would include information about what video games were talked about on the show as well as additional information about the games on the show, which may not have been covered on the show. The blog post may also include a hyperlink to where each video game could be purchased.

So what information has this blog post added to the webpage that would increase its search engine optimization and chances of turning up in a search result? First of all, it is unlikely that a show will title itself with every item it will be discussing on the show. Here the blog post is able to identify what is being discussed in text, because at the moment search engine results are not measured with audio. In many cases, blog post have a hierarchy of text, there are headings, subheadings, and paragraphs. Each hierarchy of text offers different values for search engine optimization. This is important to understanding how to properly target your audience in Weinberger’s third order, which is digitally unlimited and miscellaneous. Both creating connections and being narrowly defined is key to organizing the miscellaneous when it comes to the Internet.

 

Television-There’s No Place Like This Digital Home

“In a miscellaneous world, an Oz-like authority that speaks in a single voice with unshakable confidence is a blowhard. Authority now comes from enabling us inescapably fallible creatures to explore the differences among us, together.”

Everything is Miscellaneous-David Weinberger

 

The central theme running through Weinberger’s book “Everything is Miscellaneous” is that we’ve left the physical world behind and are now operating in a digital world. In the past, everything had its one place. Consumers demanded order, labels and organization. Today, one size doesn’t fit all. Things can still be organized but in multiple ways and in multiple places.  It gets messy and that’s ok. Miscellaneousness is not a bad thing, in fact, by releasing the grip we have on information and order, the digital world gives consumers an even bigger picture of the things they care about, even information they didn’t know they might be interested in. Viewers can also play a role in the creation of the things they want to read, watch, know or share with others.

Even an order-driven medium such as television is working in an orderless digital world now. Weinberger speaks directly to the history of broadcast television when he mentions an “Oz-like authority.” Until digital media took off a few years ago, opening up the doors for citizen journalists and bloggers, television executives were the men behind the curtain. They called the shots, giving viewers the information they wanted them to have. Information was ordered and shared in a certain way.  Content was ordered into programs, schedules and channels. There was only one voice, experts (executives) who controlled what viewers heard.  News was scarce. According to Weinberger, these physical limitations on how information was organized narrowed the vision of those receiving it. But as social media does, it gave a voice to those who previously didn’t have one.  News, which was once scarce, became embedded in the population. Broadcast television began losing some of its control. The viewers who used to be force fed by station executives and broadcast anchors started banding together , collecting their miscellaneous information and sharing it, all in one place. When this information joins up with other information, it’s suddenly more valuable. Television changed. Broadcast stations realized that changing the rules enables their viewers to get even more value from the content they produce.  People want to be able to listen or watch programs whenever they want.  It’s now interactive. The viewers are smarter and are joining forces with the stations through avenues such as social media and even on the broadcast stations’ main sites to find specific programs they want to watch. The information distribution at television stations is no longer segregated. It’s integrated with other digital platforms, information sources and video sites. Programming is no longer attached to its schedule. Programs stand alone and can be watched and re-watched and shared. This miscellaneous order has transformed television and media as well as the viewers who participate in it.  The “fallible creatures” who used to only receive information are now the ones dictating how information is created and shared in the digital world.

Smart TVs – What’s Next?

Analog to Digital Transmission

by Alan H. Rose

In “Remediation: Understanding New Media” by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, they suggest that Toy Story is the first full-length animation generated totally by computer graphic animation. They then bring up the point that, “if computer graphics can remediate conventional film, then film can remediate computer graphic by incorporation,” on page 184. This concept translates into the study of television in a slightly different application.  I am going to present facts and methods of transmission for both analog and digital television presenting my reasoning why one method is a form of remediation while the other is not.

Digital television as defined by thefreedictionary.com is, “television in which the picture information is transmitted in digital form once it hits the television receiver”. Even though the digital signals are being sent out they are first converted into a binary code using positive and non-positive elements expressed as the numbers zero and one. Since there is a breakdown of information into binary code and a digital transmission of the video is this remediation of itself? Is a video that is being sent digitally to a television the same video but in different form or since it’s the same form it once was not considered a form or remediation. I’d like to argue that this is a form of remediation. Although if everything in the transmission goes smoothly and as it should the video will look identical to the way it looked before broken down and transmitted, if the signal is faulty a different picture can occur once the binary code is received on the other end. If the coloration of part of the video has changed or the audio is muffled it is not in the exact same form as the original video before transmission. Due to this factor, even though a change is unlikely, the ability for the change causes this to be a form of remediation.

Analog television as defined by thefreedictionary.com, “encodes television picture and sound information and transmits it”.  This was the format before the technology of digital television was discovered. Analog transmission uses signals that are identical replicas of the sound waves and pictures being sent. While the ability for these signals to not come through the transmission process exactly identical to the original content could cause for a distortion, I’d like to argue that this is not a form of remediation because the audio and video signals are not being converted into a different format like with the digital transmission to a digital television. Since analog transmission to an analog television is sending waves and digital transmission to a digital television is sending binary code there is a difference.

While digital signals are looked at as a simple upgrade to analog signals to the untrained eye, the way the transmission methods differ cause one form (digital) to be a form of remediation and the other (analog) not. By analyzing both forms of transmission, I’m able to bring this discussion full-circle to the point of how computer graphics can remediate conventional film. If a digital format can remediate a traditional film, a digital television’s transmission signal can remediate an analog television’s transmission signal.

Remediation: Television

Remediation: Television

Transparency creates immediacy, according to Bolter and Grusin, and transparency is achieved by creating a likeness to reality, a simulacrum.

However, Bolter and Grusin seem to only consider this simulacrum as a commodity when discussing commercials. While the nature of television broadcast in a capitalist system dictates that each channel becomes a competing faction, as the television shows with the best ratings and most viewers attract the best paying advertisers, it should also be said that simulacrum is a constant commodity in American television.

Specifically, how does this relationship between simulacrum and commercialism affect news broadcast? How do news stations decide what to report on? I would argue that major narratives are emphasized and the minor narratives are ignored. The decision to stress certain stories creates a historical narrative that represents only certain points-of-view. The stories that will attract the widest audiences, or perhaps the most affluent audiences, might become priority. Foucault argues that this filtering creates a “neglected and whole range of phenomena which have been denied a history” (Sarup 59). Thus, we find ourselves in “ a profusion of entangled events…We want historians to confirm our belief that the present rests upon profound intentions and immutable necessities. But the true historical sense confirms our existence among countless lost events, without a landmark or point of reference” (Foucault, 2003, 361).

Also, with the advent of news broadcast, the global world has become localized in our living rooms. Events from the day saturate our culture instantaneously. In this sense, Baudrillard’s idea of simulacrum has its own value as a commodity – whoever can erase the linear sense of time and find the viewer in a hyper-referential omnipresent global village has the best commodity. Baudrillard says, “production and consumption give way to the era of networks, to the narcissistic and protean era of connections, contact, contiguity, feedback and generalized interface that goes with the universe of communication” (Baudrillard 1992, 151).

The news broadcast stations, according to Baudrillard, create this instantaneous society, but offer no way to create a cohesive structure from the constant feed, they “leave hardly any scope for interpretation, except for all interpretation at once, by which they evade any desire to give them meaning and elude the heavy attraction of a continuous history…They arrive – mostly unforeseen – more quickly than their shadows, but they have no sequel…One has the impression that events form on all their own and drift unpredictably toward their vanishing point – the peripheral void of the media. (Baudrillard 1994, 19)

I would argue that this selling of simulacrum creates a spectacle, centered in our living rooms. Debord’s “Spectacle of the Society,” where the concept of society is described as a “media and consumer society, organized around the consumption of images, commodities and staged events” is realized (Kellner 2). Images, according to Debord, “become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior,” these images in turn “makes one see the world by means of various specialized meditations (it can no longer be grasped directly)” (Debord 18). Like Baudrillard argues, there is no possible interpretation, only “meditation.”

So, in conclusion, it is important to consider what “transparency” and “representation” mean in today’s world, and how television markets this transparency. It’s important to think of immediacy as a commodity, not only in television commercials, but in all facets of television.

 

Baudrillard, Jean. “The Ecstasy of Communication.” ed. Jenks, Charles. The Postmodern Reader. 1992.

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit, MI: Black & Red. 1983

Foucoult, Micheal. 2003. The Essential Foucault. ed. Paul Rabinow, Nicholas Rose. The          New Press. New York, New York. 2003.

Sarup, Madan. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Post-modernism. Second            Ed. Pearson Education Limited. Essex, England. 1993.