blog post 6. Jenkins and Weinberger

The introduction sample that we read from Henry Jenkin's Convergence Culture was very interesting. I have always been interested in the idea of convergence, especially when applied to popular culture, and it turns out that Jenkin's has gone and made a career out of analyzing the convergence of new media and how new/old media thrive, fall,and eventually coexist... and the guy is an MIT professor!

My summary of this introduction, and thus Jenkin's main points were the focus on the shift in media culture. How convergence has been grouped into this idea of a "single black box" and what it really means when different media converge. The cultural shift towards more gadgets and more information has not lead us down this predicted black box path, but Jenkin's is keen to point out that it might not have manifested anyways. Jenkin's tends to focus less on the physical act of converging things, and tends to look more at how ideas converge and what that might mean for industries in the future. Can we all get together and solve each other's problems?

In comparison to Weinberger, I am seeing a trend in how both authors tend to look at the use of crowds in gathering and manipulating data. Weinberger looked to crowds and focused on how people could gather data and what could be achieved when people lost control and gave the power to the crowd. Jenkins is close to this idea, but his work seems to be looking more at how these acts will affect us culturally and the ways we perceive the different media we use today.

Blog Post 5: Heidegger

"the meaning of a particular thing is enabled by the web of implicit meanings we call the world"

We understand things that exist in our "world" because we humans have the ability to distinguish all of the hidden meanings inherent in things around us. Weinberger uses Heidegger's example of a hammer in the book. Just for the sake of originality Ill use a different example.
A lighter is a multitude of things. It is a small piece of plastic with a metal top, fuel inside, and igniter that fits snuggly in my palm. It allows me to spark a flame into existence. I was told not to play with them when I was younger. If you carry one, people generally think you smoke. If people think you smoke, they think youre unhealthy or have made a bad life decision, or maybe except you into a social circle. A lighter is something people ask you for before they go outside. It creates a flame of a certain size. It is knowing the brightness of the flame, the dull color of the plastic.... yada yada.
These are a small sample of the implicit meanings that come to my mind when I look at this one thing. Weinberger is talking about these meanings and what we think of when we perceive objects around us. The culmination of all these meaning create our realities and the world around us.

This idea of implicit meanings ties into Weinberger's third order. Because order is no longer bound by the physical when online, things can be tied together through tags, links, etc in a fashion that is more closely related to the way we perceive meaning in our heads. We do not need metadata such as a card catalog to find things, Things will already have been paired together in several different ways that seem more natural to us.