I’m still wrestling with this article by Jaron Lanier, but thought I would go ahead and post the link until I’m able to articulate my thoughts. I’m very ambivalent about much of what he has to say. There are plenty of valid points concerning the dangers of group-think and ‘hive mind’ mentalities, but he also seems way too dismissive of the egalitarian potential of bottom-up production and ordering of knowledge. Fascinating, difficult and thought-provoking nonetheless.
Alex Wright summarizes his IA Summit presentation on Stone Age Information Architecture, or, “how pre-literate cultures manage their collective intellectual capital.” He adds a valuable insight to the ongoing debate between old-guard hierarchical systems of classification and tagging/social classification, namely, that hierarchical classification may be more deeply ingrained in our cultural past than we realize.
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The Washington Post reports that San Francisco interactive agency Method has been engaged by the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum to lead a major redesign of their existing site. Only about 500 items from the 250,000-piece collection are currently viewable to the public. The new site will encourage visitors to play a curatorial role through the use of social classification a la flickr and delicious.
[T]echnology can let Web users — and museum visitors — create their own exhibitions, add content and engage in communication among themselves, reducing the institution to the role of go-between… The museum also wants to enable Web visitors to curate shows and build virtual collections, to circulate favorite digital photos. Web visitors also might be able to fill in the blanks on works that have yet to be researched fully. Shifting the curatorial responsibility might seem risky, but in 2002, a visiting researcher helped the museum by discovering an unsigned Michelangelo in a box of drawings.
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