The Web is A Party. Microcontent between Social Conversation and Semantic Cloud.
The term ?social software? mirrors the ambiguous characteristics the Web had shown from its very beginnings: It is made up of ?cold? software, algorithms, code and at the same time made up of ?warm? people, communications, feelings ? Often this opposition is just used polemically in one way or the other: The scepticists emphasize the technological or the economical side of the Web, the evangelists praise emerging new kinds of communities and new qualities of communication.
But beyond these polemical stereotypes, it seems on closer consideration that it is the dialectical twist itself, and the feedback it generates, that is in fact really fascinating for both sides. The evolutionary leaps of the Web are happening where social structures and software are linked together by surprising feedback loops.
In the blogosphere people upload themselves to the Web not just to have ?human experiences? they lack in the ?real world?. They are giving themselves over to a technological structure ?to get something going?, to get some some unforeseeable feedback transforming the ?natural self.?
And the same is true the other way round: In the era of the Web 2.0, the most interesting kinds of software are integrating ?human agents? to get a wealth of input data that can be further processed.
But there is a third dimension to the Web, beyond the ?Social Web vs. Software Web? dichotomy. The Web is essentially made of signs: of graphical patterns, of pictures, and most importantly, of written text. And these signs are organized into ?microcontent? that is forming clusters, clouds, threads, and loose patterns of all kinds. The Web is not just a publishing medium, it is creating very special kind of semiological dynamics.
After going through the definitions of ?microcontent?, this paper will discuss three approaches to describe the ?Semiotic Web?:
(a) Starting from David Weinberger?s characterisation of the Web as ?a conversation? it will be asked, how the flow of these peculiar asynchronous screen-conversations can be described and analyzed in detail.
(b) The metaphor of the ?party? will be introduced: A party consists of bundles of conversations that create a temporary ?semantic cloud?, hanging over the heads of the participants and influencing any further conversations, which are further nurturing the cloud, and so on.
(c) The Social Web will finally be looked at as a ?big murmur? in the sense of Foucault, where the people speaking are ?erased like faces drawn in sand at the edge of the sea?. The questions Foucault had brought on for the far more static texts, statements and discoursess of the Gutenberg Galaxy will be transferred to the Blogoshere and the Web 2.0: What are the modes of existence for each statement? Where can they be used, how can they circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself? What are the places in them where there is room for possible subjects? ?
This reconstruction of the ?Semiotic Web? will finally be used to have new look at the dialectical relations of the ?Social Web? and the ?Software Web?: How can the special ?personal? and ?social experiences? of the Web be described under the perspective of ?microcontent?, the ?semantic clouds? and the self-organizing patterns created by Foucault?s ?statements?? And what can be learned from this about new kinds of a ?fuzzy Semantic Web?, from those already emerging, building on tagging/folksonomies, to future ones that would use and exploit more subtle semantic textures.
Posted by martin at October 2, 2006 10:54 AM