Tuesday, February 8, 2011

#5 implicitly explicit

 "the meaning of a particular thing is enabled by the web of implicit meanings we call the world"

     What Weinberger and Heidegger are saying is that without any implicit meanings, the world would be just definitions. Based on peoples experiences with different things, specific objects can mean any number of things to different people. Like when I see a pencil I don’t just see something to write with. I see something that I can make art with and create different marks and messages through something other than just writing. Yes, there are other people out there who think the same way as me but there is any number of people out there who see the pencil as something very different. The same thing goes for every object in our material world and with every object every person could have an entirely different definition for what that object really means. The “web of implicit meanings we call the world” helps give each person definitions for each object.
     The third order of order fits into this because with the way people order things now, we can add an unlimited amount of tags to anything, including implicit definitions. In doing so we are labeling things with more than one definition. Weinberger gives good examples of this using Walmart product suggestions after purchasing items online. Anything can have any number of labels and we can define things differently with the use of images, videos, articles, blogs, dictionaries, etc. Because we are able to do this we gain a better understanding of the world around us and in the end we can label things however we would like to as long as it works for us.


6 comments:

  1. I think everyone thinks differently as far as their associations go, but sites like amazon.com try and use our buying power against us and use our associations to influence us. We can each only have one experience unique to us that includes those things which we associate with. The first memory we have of eating lets say, we may have had peach baby food and our parent would have spoon fed us, where we were, what the food was like and how are parent acted will dictate out memory of the event. There is no way of associating the same as another person who had peach unless we had the same experience, but even then what we are interested in would dictate a different focus.

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  2. It kind of interesting to consider all the ways in which each person’s implicit understanding of the world differs from someone else’s. Yet despite this we are all able to communicate meaningfully with each other without having to resort to explicit definitions all the time. It would be interesting to get a group of people together and have them create maps of implicit meaning for a single object (like we did for the songs but with only one thing). When you compared them all how might they be different or in what ways would they be the same? Like what Alicia said about our life events shaping our understanding of the world. How much would this sort of map vary from culture to culture? I wonder if the sort of organization that the third order makes possible can help us not only rearrange data to suit ourselves, but also to help us understand how others see the world.

    I don’t mean to say though, that explicit meaning has no purpose. It may diminish the implicit like Weinberger says, but it also allows us to be absolutely sure that we are on the “same page” when it is necessary to be so. Say in academic studies or whatnot. Explicit meaning is also needed in the first and second order of order; this sort of organization would be rather difficult without explicit meaning.
    Neat song map too. I think the screaming Beatle’s fangirl is my favorite picture.

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  3. The only problem I see with the unlimited tag cloud surrounding each object is that after a certain point, just using raw tag searches, things will actually get harder to find.

    Take for instance the Reagan-era USDA which reclassified ketchup as a vegetable... Bad tagging has all sorts of interesting consequences, but the most long-lastingly irritating is likely going to be the burying of certain "inroads" to finding your item. If enough people mislabel things as vegetables, if you're really looking for a vegetable, you might be better off searching for another keyword.

    This problem can be made worse by the systems designed to SOLVE this problem - for instance, if you weigh the value of a keyword or tag based on how many times people click on it in search results and end up on an item, things like ketchup-as-a-vegetable might become reinforced by people quite simply clicking the link just to find out WHY the site says ketchup is a vegetable.

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  4. I liked your graphic. I spent a lot of time breaking it down (Im a big Beatles fan). It was funny, but it also made perfect sense, good job.

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  5. You make a good point about how everyone sees objects differently. It almost kind of deals with psychology and the brain, but interesting nonetheless that others could be seeing things way different than I'm seeing them. I liked your song choice, and your web. Could totally see where you were going with each image, and why you picked them.

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  6. In describing tagging, you say, "we are labeling things with more than one definition." Yes, but it's important to remember who the "we" is and to what ends they're doing the tagging. Ideally, if everyone tagged information we'd have a smarter web that could understand more implicit information. Nice example.

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