By reading the Internet through a newsfeed aggregator, I have become less interested in article context and more excited about article content.
The aggregator disconnects content from source. There is a sweet detachment from origin, family, pedigree, race, creed, and association. Context isn’t important. In this regard, my reading has become less colored by the writer or the publisher.
The text stands alone.
Or, as Derrida suggested, the success of a text (be it visual, audio, moving, or written) should be based not where it is from or how it fits into a larger discourse. It should be complete in itself. Or, as Derrida put it, “there is nothing beyond the text.”
Mind you, there are always “external links” that direct one away from the text, but the most respected media source, when aggregated into a random collection of diverse news feeds, results in content that is uncolored by its pedigree. In this case, it has come full circle. Derrida supposed that a text should succeed without being contextual. Is the author of the text old, or black, or a woman, or tall or short? To Derrida, “there is nothing beyond the text,” and with the advent of hypertext, a text could not even be read without contextual and related reading. One might be able to zoom out and perceive the entire Internet as the complete text, or get closer and suck down all the referenced pages and assume that that collaborative work is in fact the text.
And the synthesis can be pretty amazing, and more often then not surprising. Where the patterns are not based on subject or topic but rather on time (when it was posted and what was going on in the world) or some other less obvious influencer.
In this case, I believe sound waves would be more apropos, because in this case, the blogosphere (and social networks in general) are echo chambers. Cascading, relational, asynchronous call-call-response ripples. And although simple circle diagrams touching and maybe overlapping a bit and sometimes connected with a dotted line simplify and make a lot of sense, I do believe that the true diagram would look more like raindrops falling into a still pond, rippling in concentric circles, interfering, intermingling, commingling, bouncing from the banks, intermingling more, and then becoming still (or at least invisible to the naked eye) until reanimated (or amplified) by new drops. Without the energy of the rain, the water returns to balance.
And the energy that animates the entire system is communication, discourse, conversation, and relationship.
On a more technical, less esoteric, note, with regards an RSS, RSS2, or ATOM feed aggregator, I use a client software, but there are also ways to aggregate your feeds online, such as Bloglines and Feedster.
Comments (3)
It does make sense. A few things though. Being a historian, the context of a piece of writing is CRUCIAL to taking the information in. You cannot take a piece of writing and use it for research if you don’t do that, or you will be digging yourself a nice little hole that’s wide open for bombardment by critics!
I think you touch on that though (by saying that you still need to take into account writers from the left or the right etc). In fact, by taking the context of a piece of writing into account, it in some ways makes you LESS bias and LESS likely to take the information at face value.
For instance, if I were to read an entourage about how horrible President Bush is from someone like Michael Moore, and I knew it was him, then I would be less apt to just suck up the information as point-blank.
HOWEVER, by taking things at a less contextual level, it also does force you to analyze the content on it’s own, but unfortunately I think there aren’t enough people willing to do that to make an almost non contextual read really effective (people are lazy, and they really suck sometimes).
Other than that though, I think that the idea in general definitely has it’s benefits, especially for people with biases or prejudices (but that’s a whole other problem that can’t be solved by contentualizing (I made that up) a piece).
What I am going to add as a result of your response is that I believe that the blogosphere has become lazy. It isn’t doing what you suggest, which is to say, footnotes and endnotes, but rather is outsourcing all of the context. Saying things like:
SUBJECT: I hate Bush!!!!
SUMMARY: That son of a bitch is a _real ass_.
POST: Nothing
With the _real ass_ being the hyperlink. It is all context and reading it through an aggregator client means I will generally (mostly) skip over it as a waste of time. Stopping requires more content, less context. The same thing with the subject/title of the article should be descriptive. So many of them never are. And many are far from accurate.
In fact, most of the posts that are the least effective are only tone, color, and emotion… outsourcing the content and context to the anchor (or target) article.
It’s a tough medium, blogs. See, people have set them up to be opinionated, which I guess doesn’t have to require footnotes (although I would love to see footnotes!) but it’s gotten to the point where it’s mere opinions. It’s like getting in an argument with someone who heard something somewhere and is spitting out rhetoric and when you ask them about it, they can’t go two sentences deep with their argument (because they have none!). Should blogging be so surface? If so, most blogs are not going to be looked at as substantial or legitimate, which might be a future problem