The Social Web / Knowledge Web / Feeling Web?
January 23, 2010
Examples
Social Web
The Social Web is currently used to describe how people socialize or interact with each other throughout the World Wide Web. Such people are brought together through a variety of shared interests. There are different ways in which people want to socialize on the Web today. The first kind of socializing is typified by “people focus” websites such as Bebo, Facebook, and Myspace. Such sites promote the person as focus of social interaction. To do this an online identity (and a profile) is constructed by each user. In many ways the profile is similar to a passport.
Other aspects of Social Web
1] Facebook Activism
2] Performance
3] Facebook and Politics
Knowledge Web
Web 1.0, 2.0 and the Semantic Web
Brain Machine Interface (BMI)
“People keep asking what Web 3.0 is. I think maybe when you’ve got an overlay of scalable vector graphics – everything rippling and folding and looking misty — on Web 2.0 and access to a semantic Web integrated across a huge space of data, you’ll have access to an unbelievable data resource.” Tim Berners-Lee (Inventor of the World Wide Web), 2006
The Feeling Web?
Touchable Holography and the Airborne Ultrasound Tactile Display
More about Tactile Display (Robert Howe, Harvard University, 2002)
Theory
Social Web
If information of all kinds is worked upon by and between machines, humans relationships also change. (Bassett, 2008)
Concept of individualization:
Individuals are freed from the contexts of tradition, history and, under globalization,space, are free to, and perhaps forced to, actively construct their own biographies and social bonds (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002).
Social relationships/ post emotional society:
The Transformation of Intimacy
A society in which emotion, and more properly the obvious and overt display of emotion, exists as a resource to be manipulated in the effort of self presentation.
He argues that emotion is increasingly detached from genuine moral commitment and/or from meaningful social action. (Mestrovic 1997)
Blogging, for the most part, is based on the notion that information is a commodity that is used to build and maintain relationships. In personal journal blogs, it is personal information, created through relationships of mutual self-disclosure, which attains a commodified status. Social relations become primarily ‘informational’, not ‘narrative’ (Wittel, 2001: 66).
Database Culture
One of the most powerful causes of a rise in database culture is obvious: a plethora of information brought about not only by the Web, but the parallel process of the convergence of all media to digital format. (Lev Manovich, 2001)
Phatic exchange is a term used to describe a communicative gesture that does not inform or exchange any meaningful information or facts about the world. Its purpose is a social one, to express sociability and maintain connections or bonds (Malinowski, 1923: 315)
Knowledge Web
The history of medium technologies is recursive so that the same issues are taken up ‘again and again at regular intervals’ although ‘with different connotations or results’. (Kittler in Armitage, 2006)
In her article ‘Fragmented Future’, Darcy DiNucci argues that Web 1.0 as we know it, which loads into a browser window in essentially static screenfulls, as being the embryo of the web ‘versions’ to come. The first signs of a Web 2.0 culture are beginning to appear and the embryo is beginning to develop. The Web was going to be understood not as screenfulls of text and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens.
According to a Wikipedia article, the semantic web can be defined as ‘a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so that they can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, sharing and combining information on the web.
Applying meaning to information from different sources is called data-meshing. So the Semantic Web is a mesh of information / knowledge, linked up in such a way as to be easily processable by machines, on a global scale.
Example 1: Wikipedia, one of the most ubiquitous ‘wikis‘ around. It can be hared, edited and accessed by anyone.
If such a web is successfully created, productivity of our informational and laborious leisure will increase, and we will practically be served by ‘digital butlers‘ (Bassett, 2008). Basically, each time we tag or make a link, we are teaching the machine.
As with the example of the Pivo 2 car robot, intelligent forms of information display are even used to strengthen a relationship between the user and these ‘digital butlers’ (Bassett, 2008).
Feeling Web?
“If a prevalent version of web 3.0 is realized, the semantic web will understand its own content – or will at least be able to compute it.” (Bassett, 2008)
The commanding robot called Gerty in ‘Moon’ (2009)
Miko Coffey argues that today, we’re starting to understand that the smart machines won’t look like robots, and that the artificial intelligence won’t be hard-wired into a self-contained unit. She mentions how the Internet is the smart, fast learning machine. (2007)
Stelarc
Questions
- Can you think of more issues in medium technologies that seem to return regularly? (Kittles)
- Can these developments of these technologies pose new dangers or problems, perhaps from the perspective of surveillance or identity?
