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February 17, 2005
Small Pieces disjointed
I've been following my colleagues' posts about our week's reading over on Network(ed) Rhetorics about David Weinberger's book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, and the website he co-authored (back to that term in a minute) with Doc Searls called World of Ends. And while I have some questions about some of the terms and assumptions in both pieces, I seem much less inclined to jump on those problems. I'm really much more interested in the potential and the philosophy I find there.
Philosophy?
Yeah. Am I the only one who noticed the many references in Weinberger to Heidegger? Am I the only one who noticed that really cool Star Trek moment of talking-to-the-energy-being-at-the-edge-of-the-galaxy-about-the meaning-of-being-embodied? Maybe because I'm more of a Trekkie than a techie I glommed on to this aspect of the work, one that I can more easily relate to. It might also because I'm reading Phillip Goodwin's book Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety for my religion class this week, and he has a whole chapter called "Potency" that opens with this Derridaean/Heideggerian moment of death/embodiment, time and care. More about the Goodwin text elsewhere, but the overlap with Weinberger in these two very different contexts seemed worth paying attention to. Weinberger sees the Web as a body-less space, a space where identity can be constructed and connections made that are freed from the physical limits of embodiment. But as Tyra so eloquently observed, blogging is writing. There is a physical materiality to the act of producing the components that make up the web - words, the machinery and software and communication devices than enable the transmission of words, or the placement of words, into the web space. Some physical limits, like two objects occupying the same space at the same time, are transcended, but others aren't. Bodies are still required, bodies that carry identities and values shaped by relationships.
The energy being at the edge of the galaxy may be body-less, but that is not the same as omnicient. The fact that I have access to the web and a certain understanding of how to navigate it and add my words to its content does not mean that I know it or all that is within in it. Sometimes I go point by point, systematically through the many ends that touch one another until I am somewhere completely on the far side of the sphere. Other times, because I know a shortcut or two, I cut through the hollow core directly to that far place. I tend to jump to places with content that matters to me, but in that direct leap I may miss information that matters to others, that could matter to me, if I knew it was there, which I don't unless I invest the time to link my way step by step through the possibilities.
Time boundaries restrict the number of things the embodied I can care about, that matter to the mind in this body in this limited temporal space.
disjointed piece number 1 concluded.
Posted by cageyer at February 17, 2005 10:05 AM