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.”
In my world of scanning madly the mediasphere and the blogosphere, I find my experience less contextual but more self referential. Since I read hundreds of feeds aggregated into one reader, they all blend together. If an article it can keep me, it has me. And that article is rarely from the NYTimes’ RSS feed. In that regard, there really 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 my work, I need to at least keep track of blogs from the left, right, from the up and down, from the legal profession and into IP law, from entertainment to pop culture, from movies to video games, from technology to the academy — from hither to thither — and the more I think these feeds are diverse and balkanized, the more I realize that they are mere different wavelengths of the same energy. IR and UV and the visible spectrum are, out of context of the medium unless you know that they are all light.
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.
The Internet, like the pond, is merely a neutral solution in which things (sound, light, color, dye, etc) can be suspended or introduced. Without external energy, entropy takes over and then, to return to my analogy, the pond is again a placid mirror, glassy and neutral.
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.
