[school] Presentation on "Power, Structure, Classification, and Information"
As I prepare my thoughts for my presentation on Tuesday, I thought I'd use LJ as a place to lay stuff out and see what any interested readers may have to say on the subject. Feel free to disagree or point me to places of possible interest if you so desire. So far, I've only read 2 of the 4 articles that my presentation is to cover. I have to take
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On the other hand, there's the problem of incompetent people way overestimating their own competence -- or to put it another way, all the tagging in the world doesn't do much to democratize knowledge if it's being done by monkeys. Or even by pants-wearing robot monkeys with typewriters. Although that would be so cool.
On the other other hand, I'm not sure that authority is usually what people are looking for: in a few privileged research worlds, yeah, sure. But there's a whole lot of good-enough in real-world information-seeking behavior. Also, a lot of interesting, cool, shiny, momentarily distracting, and anyway tomorrow, who cares? So, looking at the question of how you recognize authority among the many resources/communities dealing with the same subject is missing the whole question of whether authority is what's desired.
And at least much of the time (citing my gut as an authoritative source, here) collecting information isn't even what's wanted, even if a lot of information gets passed around. Which isn't a bad thing, but there's a problem with mistaking social tools (which are essentially about forming bonds between people) for research tools (which are about finding and using information).
On the etc., are we just replacing authority with popularity?
And I'm running out of hands here. Also, after 5:00. Bye-bye complete sentences!
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