Internet superstar and all-round bundle of awesomeness Danah Boyd has a new post up about an experience she had at a conference in Italy, where she was sternly and publicly rebuked for ‘not paying attention’ during a lecture. Of course, while she was ‘goofing off’, Boyd also:
“had looked up six different concepts he had introduced (thank you Wikipedia), scanned two of the speakers’ papers to try to grok what on earth he was talking about, and used Babelfish to translate the Italian conversations taking place on Twitter and FriendFeed in attempt to understand what was being said. Of course, I had also looked up half the people in the room (including the condescending man next to me) and posted a tweet of my own.”
But while the piece starts out as what I suppose is a defence of techno-multitasking, it moves towards considering the effects of a persistent, accessible and ubiquitous network of information. On some level – and even the iPhone is starting to bring us towards this – ‘the network’ enables the creation of a kind of cyborg, one with constant access to both data and databases, computers and computing power. This future-fantastic world is underpinned by a constant backchannel of chatter, a subcutaneous, pre-conscious layer of speech that hovers and hums in the background while conversations happen over and above and around it. Right now, this is probably best exemplified by Twitter, and having seen how much it enlivens and enriches a conference, I can tell you this is far less scary than it sounds.
The other interesting thing here is what happens to knowledge, both in its application and value. It seems that a database approach to knowledege will become key: that ’smarts’ will now be about putting together knowledge that everyone else has access to in new, different, and newly usable ways, and I think it’s here that we might see a shift from the dominance of narrative to the primacy of the database.
The value of knowledge is an interesting question too. What will happen when knowledge is everywhere, accessible to everyone? A friend likes to argue that we’ll see a ‘return’ – but not – to a kind of oral culture. And that, I think, is about a good a guess as any I’ve heard.
Yes! Who would have thought that secondary orality (like the industrial city) would be a century-long blip, a detour, an aberration?
The RAship that I’m working on right now enacts that shift to database knowledge in interesting ways. Peter Paolucci is working on a new sort of critical edition of Shakespeare’s plays not in terms of the usual line + footnote/endnote format (in which the play text and the annotations are fixed, and fixed together following the arc of the narrative), but rather in a way that disposes with the fixed text altogether. Instead, the critical edition is simply criticism/commentary being pulled from the webiverse, matched up with the play text, then scripted into an ever evolving website that can take into account what *anyone* has to say about Shakespeare’s plays (which the reader can then widen or narrow down as they like). Quite interesting. Well, my part of it isn’t, but the project is.