Convergence Culture - Intro

1. The introduction of this book is about what he plans to talk about with media convergence. There is not too much in detail yet, simply because this in an intro but what he has to say is very insightful. He discusses how he wants people to understand how convergence is impacting the media they consume but he also seems to focus on the popular culture subject area. What these changes mean to us and how they will change is what he will be discussing in his upcoming chapters.

2. “Printed words did not kill spoken words. Cinema did not kill theatre. Television did not kill radio.”

“Yet, history teaches us that old media never die-and they don’t even necisarially fade away. What dies are simply the tools we use to access media content.”

“Welcome to convergence culture, where old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways.”

3. This relates to my life in almost every way. I am always researching on my spare time for whats new and what is to come in the technological world. Reading and dissecting the future of some of these technologies. Ever since I was a kid, I would get the newest technology at the time, no matter how long I had to save up for it.

4. How does this relate to Everything is Miscelaneous? This books talks about how all these things are converging or building off of each other, in Weinberger’s book, he talks about how there is so much out there that it needs to be organized. With the more convergence there is, the more organizing and forms of organizing there needs to be.

So what?

This book is the kind of book that connects all the miscellaneous things that are out there and makes something new, and understandable out of them. The world is divided into categories, topics, and subjects because physical objects need to be in one place or another, they can't be in all the places they might belong. But, computers and the Internet turn this all around because a computer can place these things in as many categories as they need to be in. It is done by individuals classifying this information. Technology is taking over but only with the help of us.

Every hierarchy is under assault from the Internet. It reveals the biases underneath our systems. Weinberger makes a great case for a new kind of knowledge that better represents the messy but, glorious realityof the real world. Everything is Miscellaneous is what is important to our understanding of the Internet. All this knowledge, data, information and everything is out there and the web is filtering through this information; but only with our help.

Chapter 8 & 9

Chapter 8:

I found chapter 8 very interesting. It talked about things that I have always wondered myself. Like, what the purposes of some signs are and even what I see on the internet really is. The information that is on the web does not always tell you everything when it comes to tagging and this chapter discussed how we may not always be getting everything but we are getting a variety of information from one thing.

With the web being an open source this is much more of an issue now. I also enjoy the explicit and implicit information that was talked about. The implicit is what I am always thinking about when I see things online. The what if's or the information behind the subject. When he discussed the explicit being too obvious at times that it makes our society look dumb, I completely agreed. I see signs all the time that I dont think, have a point because they are to obvious. I feel like the implicit information is the real descriptive information. It is much more than just tags.

Chapter 9:

This chapter was also very interesting. Its about how things may not seem organized but they are in some certain order for some other use. Then, the more information that comes in, the more jumbled and mixed up the information gets. Information is always needed to be ordered by someone for something.

I find this chapter to be very personal to some. Everyone has their own way of organization. Whether it is throwing all their photos into just one folder titled "images" or if it is making numerous folders within folders giving each item its own place. This is where the web has some issues. If people do things differently, then how should it be ordered online? The web was built from people just "post it. Just link to it. Click. Done" said Weinberger. With all these posts and links everywhere, how is the organized human supposed to find the information they are looking for. Organization is key, but each person has their own way of doing it.