Accountability and Culture in a Loosely Coupled World

"But how can we hold an author or creator accountable when their creation is removed from the technical context, and more importantly, the social context, in which it was created?"

How about the visual culture? Esp. when it is removed from its native context in which it was created? In a culture that is ever more visually fluent...

To paraphrase Jeff Veen, the internet is a wonderful intersection of image, text, and code. I love this description.

If Mr. Veen has the right of it, which I think he does, where is the visual element in this? We have aggregators, writers, RSS, code, Atom, etc., but what happens to the design, the images, the third aspect of the web?

We connect, we search, we find each other, we have apps that pull out the text, tags, and code, but what about the visual image?

I know it is late, and I just had to throw it out there.

smiles, jen ;o)

I did a paper a few years ago on weblogs and suggested that the take up of weblogs was viral - nothing particularly revolutionary there, of course - when people start enjoying making and writing in public they want to introduce their friends to it too, and then this generates local network effects which make the experience even more entertaining or involving. Weblogs spread along familial/friend, geographical and interest lines as people come across sites and are inspired to start sites of their own.

The consequence of this is that these organically emerging webloggers enter the environment already as part of a culture - either by relationship to a weblog they admire or because a friend or family member is already posting. There are people who come fresh to weblogging, of course. I'd be interested to know if there's a higher churn rate for them (and I'd suggest that Blogger is their entry drug).

I completely get that there's a Livejournal culture - and I'm totally with you that software influences how people write and interact with each other - but there does seem to me to be a mistake in thinking that the software should determine the limits of a culture - ie. it could be seen as a failing of Livejournal that the internal culture is so strong but distinct from the variety of weblog cultures. It seems like the ecosystem should be breaking down those barriers, allowing people to clump by interests or style or personality or geography. And as the barriers are perhaps reduced, then the social connectivity of the weblog sphere perhaps needs to rise to the challenge as well...

With regard to your large point, the aggregators and filters are becoming the large grazing herbivores of the ecosystem that digest everything and turn it into useful, nutricious manure. As ever in these situations, evolution comes with risk. I recently made the message boards I run at Barbelith spiderable by Google. The consequence was social uproar as new people entered the site on a whim after stumbling on long-dead threads and posted without reading FAQs or without knowing the complex set of social morays that the board requires. My instinct is to say that decontextualisation will be met by other tools to recontextualise, but I guess we can look at various moments in weblog history and recognise that the culture has taken dramatic turns without people being able to redress them. Perhaps this is one of those turning points.

The thing that strikes me as crazy about the whole "tags" phenomenon (which overall has some merit, enabling people to find content of interest) is that there is no organizing principle, no agreed-upon set of tags/subjects/categories. Thinking of getting Internet users to think like library catalogers is snort-inducing, of course. But, for example, what if one person uses "books," another "reading material," another "what's on the nightstand," etc. Obviously all this material is related, but it will never be linked because there is no standard set of tags.

Not to help hijack, but I don't believe those sets would never be linked. There are definite affordances to use short words ("books" versus what del.icio.us would have you write as "whatsonthenightstand," which would mean something entirely different on Flickr anyway). Peter Merholz suggests common tags will be "desire lines" people beat through the tag space. In addition there are feedback mechanisms to narrow the tags you might select, such as suggesting known synonyms, showing other tags on similar items, and making it easy to select tags you or the community have already used.

Linking related tags together isn't necessarily easy, but neither is it impossible.

This is classical in terms of seo. Naught looks to annoy against them than this!