Controllery
Zeldman has now twice pontificated about the flawed near-ubiquity of tag clouds, and of folksonomies in general. He’s got a point: the appreciation of the value of a thing based solely on its popularity isn’t a precursor to the “have a website and a smile” ethos of the internet a lot of folks are still waiting for; but I’m not sure his point matters. The proliferation of strains of folksonomy and its ilk represents a symptom of the notion that users really, in their hearts, would rather be doers. Less vaguely, that consumers want to prance around in producers’ threads. I think it’s likely the consumer thinks she wants precisely that. She doesn’t, though, not completely. That she’ll pay hard-earned cash to buy into it is a point more worth scrutinizing.
There’s an incredibly, infinitessimally fine line between empowerment and slave labor, in the context of our media enriched society. Drawing ourselves up by our bootstraps (with, of course, a hand offered by corporate research, development, and marketing), we feel as if we’re laying claim to some lost—no, purposefully hidden—intellectual and creative reserve. Anyone bothering to read this blog, any blog, let alone write for one herself, likely wrings her hands contemplating which of the legion paths to take toward media convergence, even media control. She can start a free hosted weblog account, a free image hosting account, use a variety of free widgets for tracking and customizing and syndicating and sharing and subscribing to and sorting this stuff, stuff I am loathe to call information too quickly. She can hop aboard any of the continuous stream of freshly painted bandwagons rolling off the line.
There’s something more foul afoot here, though, in some cases. The media distribution industry should shit themselves if consumers can be whiled to take upon their shoulders as much of the labor of distribution as will fit, and they call it “freedom”. Some subscribe to satellite radio stations ostensibly to feed their specific brands of idolatry; but it’s only available because it’s much more cost effective to churn out 100 preprogrammed channels with variety between them than 50 channels of variety within them. Most people who listen to music know what country & western or ska or deathmetal or jazz sounds like, and subscribers can subscribe to multiple genres to find whatever variety they might like (to a degree, of course). Paying someone who’s got something of a clue to choose playlists with an ear for balancing popular genre tracks with those less easily pigeonholed costs more. Else, why would WOXY have been forced to serve up network tunes at less-than-optimal bandwidth? Yahoo! Music (LAUNCHcast) has better sound quality, and I’m tempted to feel a little empowered by my “freedom” to skew my “station” to my own tastes—I’ve never heard anywhere else Coldplay sharing air time with Machines of Loving Grace and Ella Fitzgerald. However, WOXY will air stuff that isn’t even on Yahoo! Music’s 12-month media map (to be generous); and, having been a local listener to the now-defunct terrestrial signal, listening to 97X was more like your savvier friends carting over their tapes and CDs than listening to the radio. The closest LAUNCH comes to this (and it doesn’t come close) is in its implementation of a folksonomic system, not unlike Amazon’s, though a fellow LAUNCH user can supposedly recommend songs to you from his “station”.
While indulging my penchant to arrive more than fashionably late to the party, I’ve skulked and observed the frantic pace at which new tools are used to find new deficiencies in our scheme of datasculpting (the purist in me finds no more comfort calling this interaether “data”; but at some point some common lexicon must be accepted, and, at least colloquially, “data” has a more austere appeal than does “information”). I have to think everyone riding that wave of potential emergence wants to play the part of explorer, even settler, though what precisely it is he thinks will emerge to settle I don’t know. There does seem to be some intrinsic topology to this technological progress, our collective fingers tracing its surfaces and textures in the dark, attempting to divine through our ingenuity what looms before us, unseen. I fancy the awe myself, I’ll admit.
All the same, there’s a point—probably quite different for each of us— at which we’ve abstracted ourselves from a sensible world and become driven to tweak and upgrade and even engineer, when maybe we could use some fresh air and a cup of coffee.
I’m no NeoLuddite. I get lost daydreaming about the horizon glinting with shiny new possibilities. I’m obviously not beyond tapping into some of this socioeconomic energy (don’t fool yourself into thinking there isn’t currency floating right alongside of your digital bits). I’m fortunate, though, to have enough other things vying for my time and grey matter that I can’t fully indulge my temptation, much as I might pout that it is so, sometimes.
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