Comments | fabby: [school] Presentation on "Power, Structure, Classification, and Information"

fabby

[school] Presentation on "Power, Structure, Classification, and Information"

Oct 19, 2006 09:47

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 ( Read more... )

presentation, school, fall quarter 2006, information in society

Comments 3

gchick October 19 2006, 19:11:05 UTC

You do realize you're making me want to go to school rightthefuck now?

Anyway, the lurker business doesn't strike me as an access question, or rather, not entirely an access question: By definition, the lurkers *do* have quite a bit of access, so solutions (if they're even a problem? that depends a lot on the goals of the community/site/resource/whatev in question) based on bridging the digital divide or name-your-inclusive-buzzword miss the mark. Having both the (self-perceived; the community may have either higher or lower bars than the lurker thinks) authority to speak and enough engagement to bother doing so is a much more complicated problem. Access is necessary but not sufficient. Also, they support me! In email!

fabby October 19 2006, 20:41:21 UTC

Woohoo a reply! You are right about the access thing. I was thinking of using it as a "desire" thing. Like mainly those who are passionate (as in love or hate) will bother adding their 2 cents. Also those who are extroverted will be represented more than introverts. While these aren't really access issues, they sort of relate because again you're getting a skewed representation if only those with the desire are posting. This would also be true of tagging and blogs. So if these authors are holding up tagging, blogs, and RSS (which I don't really get since it's one-way communication) as alternative forms of classification, I think there are many possible issues with it.

gchick October 19 2006, 22:10:19 UTC

On the one hand, hyper-empowered librarians hand-selecting every article that goes up on a portal adds up to (a) the reason Google won over Yahoo and (b) way too frackin' much work for the people who actually have to do the classifying. (Note: not the same as the ones who come up with the taxonomies - another power and classification question for ya ( ... )