miscellaneous thought
Something to remember to think about:
What David Weinberger calls "miscellaneous" -- which is conceived with an emphasis on spatiality, upon tag-able features of items, things, thingliness, contains something else that the web is unconcealing: temporality - which is never more completely hidden than in broadcast stagings of "history."
What David Weinberger calls "miscellaneous" -- which is conceived with an emphasis on spatiality, upon tag-able features of items, things, thingliness, contains something else that the web is unconcealing: temporality - which is never more completely hidden than in broadcast stagings of "history."
posted by Tom Matrullo at Friday, October 12, 2007
5 Comments:
You old Heideggerian you! And I totally agree. Temporality is at the heart of so many Web innovations.
And you're also right that "miscellaneous" is a spatial metaphor, pointing to a pile that is ever-growing but somewhat inert, which (you're right again) is a weakness of the metaphor. Within that particular metaphor, temporality shows up as just one more type of metadata; e.g., wouldn't it be nice if we knew when a tag was created. It'd be interesting (and difficult) to reconceive the iscellaneous along temporal terms.
- David Weinberger
so a "tag cloud" will dispel the fog of war?
Adding date info to tags - hmmm. One possible result: a new set of metadata that would consist solely of the dates of tags . . . which would then generate a new set of metadata consisting of tags that dated the tags that date the tags. This would be one of the ways the flow of time would be tracked -- pointing up the futility of ever "grasping" the flit of time.
I nominate "iscellaneous" for word of the next isolate.
Any metaphor that drives home the futility of attempts to centrally control information markets is good enough for me. Combine that with the Dewey decimal system repurposed via a Borgesian Babel nightmare scenario and you have a viable commodity.
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