How Much is Too Much?

In James Gleick's article "After the Flood," he reflects on real and imagined libraries. Wikipedia is one of these so called imagined libraries. When I think of a traditional print-based library compared to Wikipedia I think of something that is definitive versus something that is infinitive.Wikipedia is a platform which can constantly be updated and changed and added to. Wikipedia has no limits in quantitative terms since now we are able to store anything  and everything in the "cloud," but a traditional printed encyclopedia has a certain amount of pages, a definitive beginning and end. Although the two platforms are similar in regards to the quality of what constitutes an entry, traditional library is a resource for printed archival information which has been carefully selected by experts as opposed to wikipedia which is a place for shared knowledge with contributors from all walks of life. Not only are people taking in knowledge on Wikipedia, but participating in the creation of it as well. Another thing that sets Wikipedia apart from traditional printed archives is the entries that exist. Wikipedia includes entries just about anything where as traditional encyclopedias, for instance, are more selective in terms of entries. I feel like Wikipedia is geared more towards the "everyman" so to speak where traditional archives are geared more towards people in the realm of academia.

The Great Shift

Shift:

verb (used with object)

1. to put (something) aside and replace it by another or others; change or exchange: to shift friends; to shift ideas.

2. to transfer from one place, position, person, etc., to another: to shift the blame onto someone else.

3. Automotive. to change (gears) from one ratio or arrangement to another.

4. Linguistics . to change in a systematic way, especially phonetically.

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This word, for me, is significant in order to comprehend what exactly is happening in the “digital age” that we are in. A shift of property, a shift of information, a shift of interfaces, a shift of roles and a shift in relationships. These great shifts are the basis for what Sean Dockray argues in Interface, Access, Loss from the book Undoing Property. Dockray first mentions the notion of “the cloud.” An existential entity that holds all of our “stuff.” Sounds so mystical when you say it, THE CLOUD….  It’s forever infinite, hovering above us? (yeah, right). Quite contrary. In reality, it’s like a factory. A factory of servers and wires. This is one shift that Dockray talks about. The shift from the modern industrial factory to this factory in the clouds, so to speak.

What goes hand in hand with this shift is the shift in property. Our “stuff” is no longer physical, but metaphysical. The stuff we own in this cloud is not even technically ours. This brings up questions and concerns with the notion of ownership. As Dockray states, “What is less recognized—because it is still very much in process—is the subsequent undoing of property, of both the individual and common kind. What follows is a story of “the cloud,” the post-dot-com bubble techno super-entity, which sucks up property, labor, and free time.”

Another interesting thing that Dockray brings up is the shift of relationships in the digital realm. There is a shift of how we interact with the “thing,” how others interact with us through it, and of course how we interact with the world. As Dockray puts it, things have been reduced in a sense to inputs and outputs. Our roles as users has changed drastically.

“Is this a conceptual reduction of the richness and complexity of reality? Yes, but only partially. It is also a real description of how people, institutions, software, and things are being brought into relationship with one another according to the demands of networked computation (not to mention the often contradictory demands of business, government, or collective desire); and the expanding field of objects encompasses exactly those entities integrated into such a network.”

Antisocial Media

The container concept “social media,” describing a fuzzy collection of websites like Facebook, Digg, YouTube, Twitter, and Wikipedia, is not a nostalgic project aimed at reviving the once dangerous potential of “the social,” like an angry mob that demands the end of economic inequality. Instead, the social—to remain inside Baudrillard’s vocabulary—is reanimated as a simulacrum of its own ability to create meaningful and lasting social relations.

I found the above excerpt from the article What Is the Social in Social Media? by Geert Lovink to be very interesting with the way social media is perceived as a simulacrum. In its simplest form, a simulacrum is a representation of something else, a copy of the real. This got me thinking. Is social media, then, a representation of real life? Or are we as a society trying to make social media simulate life so that is more comprehendible for us? I suppose the word social has a different meaning when it is combined with the word media. Social media has a new set of structures different then the structures we associate with the term social in real life. Social media changes relationships, roles and class structures in society. It is hard to comprehend a new definition for social than the one we already know. So, what does this mean for future generations?

The Revolution has arrived

“Or to put it another way: we are at the end of the beginning of the digital revolution.”

When I read this statement from Nancy Levinson, it dawned on me that we are in a revolution. I didn’t really think about referring this print and pixel phenomenon as a revolution before, but it is. The first part of the revolution is over. The question of preference between print and digital is already irrelevant. It is outdated. This notion was one that was interesting to me as I was reading Print and Pixel. This “revolution” impacts every aspect of our lives.

One notion from the article that I found problematic was what Levinson mentioned about copyright laws. This is a topic that I am very curious about. How is it possible to control copyrights with digital information? How could we possibly regulate this flow of content in the digital world?

And So On and So Forth

Thesis V

The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized

only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be

recognized and is never seen again. "The truth will not run away

from us": in the historical outlook of historicism these words of

Gottfried Keller mark the exact point where historical materialism

cuts through historicism. For every image of the past that is

not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens

to disappear irretrievably. 

-from Walter Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History 

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It is this excerpt from Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History that struck me the most. Thinking about it in terms of my own research on the past, present and future of language, the past is almost always referenced in the present. If only for a second, we can see a glimpse of the past in the present. This is almost always the case in regards to any subject, isn't it? How can there even be a present of something without its past? If something had no past tense, there wouldn't be a present tense of it either; it would just be. In order to have these distinct tenses, one tense must come before another tense. This is the logic of history; recedings and proceedings. All of Language, now and forever in the future, is based on the past and the established system that was created for language at that one point in history. From the moment the first sound was spoken. Then the first word. Then the first sentence. Then the moment an alphabet was created. Then the first written language. And so on and so forth. Without the past, there is no present. It's as simple as that. We only know of the past by which we see of it in the present and what we can foresee of it in the future.

The Promise of Digital Books

The first thing that Mod says at the beginning of his discussion is that in order to think about the future of the book, we have to think about the future of all content and the connections between the platforms where the content is published.

Two features of the future book defined by Mod, which I found most intriguing, were the authorial shift and the artificiality that takes place in the digital format.

Mod explains that digital books can be constantly updated in real-time. Time itself becomes an active ingredient in authorship, he says. Mod uses Wikipedia as an example of this. Wikipedia is a collaborative form of authorship and it is continuously evolving.

Books on the other hand, have more of a sense of permanence. The words are embedded in the paper, unchangeable once the book is printed. What exists on the pages today will remain there tomorrow and the next day and the next day. Books are reliable.

Does this mean that digital books are unreliable? Mod says once the format changes from print to digital, the books become artificial. Books in the digital format may only exist that way for an instance because they can constantly be updated.

The most memorable claim that Mod makes towards the end is that Digital has more of a promise of shared experiences. This is not to say that printed books do not allow for shared experiences, but the possibilities are greater with digital.

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