#6 - Jenkins and Weinberger

             The three major points that Henry Jenkins outlines in the introduction of his book are convergence, collective intelligence, and participation (p. 22).  When Jenkins says convergence, he is referring to three ideas: “the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want.”  Rather a lot of meanings for one term, I can see why he added a glossary.  The other terms are a little more self explanatory; by participation he means to contrast current user participation in media as compared to previous more passive audiences, and by collective intelligence he is referring to the action whereby a multitude of people each contribute a small piece of information to create a greater body of knowledge.  Jenkins’ focus seems to be on how the creation and consumption of media is changing (due to the key points he mentions) and what the larger ramifications of these shifts might be.

                When comparing Jenkins’ key points with the major ideas found in Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous we can see a couple areas of overlap, if not necessarily agreement.  For starters, they both seem to be largely focused on the shift in the roles and abilities of the user, or consumer.  Weinberger says many times in his book that it is the user rather than the authority figures that will shape the new “digital disorder”, through mechanisms such as tagging, reviews and other user created content.  Jenkins expresses a similar sentiment when he states that “Audiences, empowered by these new technologies, occupying a space at the intersection between old and new media, are demanding the right to participate within the culture. Producers who fail to make their peace with this new participatory culture will face declining goodwill and diminished revenues.”  I would say however that Jenkins takes a slightly more moderate view of the power of the user, as he acknowledges the power that large companies still possess, a fact that he explores in various settings, the relation of the “Star Wars” franchise to its fandom for example. 

                Jenkins and Weinberger also discuss the idea of collective intelligence.  Weinberger calls this idea “social knowing” and describes it as a process of many people working together towards a deeper understanding of information (p. 147).  Jenkins describes it as a natural outcome of human limitations; no one can know everything, so if everyone contributes a part we can combine knowledge and skills (p.4).

              There are also a couple of other concepts that both mention.  Weinberger discusses the concept of gatekeepers and how the ease of digital publishing can free us of them (p. 102-3), Jenkins also touches on this, though he suggests that we are not necessarily free of the gatekeepers (p. 18).  Lastly, both Weinberger mention how the difference between physical and digital data storage have allowed for vastly different ways of connecting and organizing information.  Jenkins briefly comments on this “digitization” and includes a quote from Nicholas Negroponte “the transformation of “atoms into bytes.”

            To wrap up I would guess (since I have not read the whole of Jenkins’ book) that Weinberger and Jenkins both discuss very similar ideas; although I suspect that they approach them from rather different viewpoints and come to different conclusions.

Yeesh… this ended up being a lot longer than I intended.  Oh well.

# 5 – Weinberger and implicit meaning

             In chapter 8 Weinberger brings up the idea of implicit meanings and a German philosopher named Martin Heidegger.  He states that "the meaning of a particular thing is enabled by the web of implicit meanings we call the world" (170).  Through his (Weinberger’s, or Heidegger’s?  not sure) example of a hammer, we see how even simple concepts are explained by and linked to multiple other ideas; in our understanding of hammer is an implicit understanding of what nails are, what they are used for and numerous other concepts.  That is to say, every idea/object is understood within a much larger context.   You wouldn’t generally bother explaining the idea of a hammer or how this idea links to other ideas, because you assume that your audience also possesses an implicit understanding of what hammers are.  Another way of looking at this is to think of every idea/object as the tip of an iceberg: the part that you consciously see (explicit meanings) rests atop a huge pile of other linked concepts that you don’t need/want to address except as they are pertinent to your current situation (implicit meanings).

                Weinberger states that implicit meaning has profound implications in the third order of order.  This is because digital data is free of the limitations of physical recordings of knowledge and the conceptual limitations of traditional databases.  He mentions that a physical logbook contains knowledge, but it isn’t very accessible (p. 170-1).  An electronic database has fewer limits and allows one to easily compile and compare information, but in order to function “properly” must leave out non-essential information.  By contrast in the third order of order, where everything is metadata, we can place any idea into any of its possible contexts.  We can link a concept to any of its implicit meanings and link those meanings to their own implicit meanings.  I think that Weinberger best describes this idea when he says “The value of the potential, implicit ways of ordering the digital miscellany dwarfs the value of any particular actualization…” (p. 171)  Basically what he is saying (as I understand it), is that the virtue of the third order and implicit meaning, is not any particularly useful way of organizing things but is the multiplicity of possible orders.  Any order can be crafted to suit any situation or need (within some outer boundary of reason anyway), due to the ability to tap into and harness implicit meanings.

                As requested I have created a visual representation of implicit meaning as it applies to a song that has meaning for me.  This particular example is actually pretty shallow compared to the possibilities that could be mapped.  It’s limited somewhat by my focus on personal meaning and the fact that I didn’t want to bore anyone by following each connection out to its nth degree.  I have attempted to show why this song is meaningful via references to emotions (mostly in parentheses) as well as events and actions.  I’m not sure if a computer could make much sense of this map, but maybe with a little tagging it could be taught. 

* Apologies if the picture is sort of uncomfortable to look at.  Somehow the colors didn’t work like I’d hoped, and it’s done in Paint, so limited tools to use.