Participation Literacy

Web 2.0 implicates a body. The body is often called “Web as a platform”. Sometimes the concept Native Web is used in a similar meaning. Native Web implies something which is born on the web and lives its whole life there. PC applications might use the web in many ways but there is a big difference between them and applications which do not know of the world outside the web.When I say “web application” I see it from the programmer’s perspective. From a user perspective, practically everything on the Web is services. But the entity called Web 2.0 application by computer specialists is more of a society for us who use it. But the word user is very lame; it is more like being citizens. From now on, I will call Web 2.0 applications, services societies and users citizens. For Web 2.0 as a whole, I will use the word Cyberspace. I use the word Cyberspace because the Web 2.0 mindset is the seed of something, which might turn into a World substantial enough to carry the epithet Cyberspace. This Cyberspace will not be similar to the popular version coined by William Gibson (1986) (1984)[1]. Gibson’s cyberspace came to life before the Internet, and a realisation of the Cyberspace thought will include the Internet in some way.

I am using the term Society to denote the world outside the net and society for the Web 2.0 Cyberspace societies. The words IR (In Reality) and VR (Virtual Reality) are not really applicable here since everything I write about is very much reality. The Cyberspace I write about is not some romantic disembodied realm. It is reality as much as the reality I meet when I listen to the nightingale a warm summer night. The word Cyberspace contains thousands of connotations and all these are valid in some sense. They give a volume to this relatively new concept.

Some of the places I mentioned in Part II use a terminology from the Society. The music community Last.fm uses the concept ‘neighbour’ to denote people with similar taste in music. This might be seen as an easy match, but I listen to a wide array of music styles and a neighbour to me does seldom share more than a tiny bit of my music interest. But that is enough. My geographical neighbours only share location – to my knowledge. I have much more in common with my neighbours at Last.fm than I have with the neighbours I share a fence with.

I am a producer of texts, we all are, and all these texts are connected. This endless web of texts is often called intertextuality. The term was coined by Julia Kristeva. She also used the term polylogue. The concept intertextuality cleared the way for a new way of looking at texts. Texts communicated with other texts, like a polyphony of non-hierarchical voices, a polylogue.(Owesen, 2003)

Intertextuality might be said to have four primary parameters:

1. Embodied or Disembodied
2. Explicit or Implicit
3. Direct or Indirect
4. Intended or Unintended

Before printing technology most texts were carried by mouth or painted on stone or wood in the form of symbols. Most texts were disembodied. When printing became the common way to express long stories, more and more texts were embodied. Digital texts are somewhere in between. They are not without body, but the body is stored encoded. When I read the text, it is decoded and displayed in a temporary form. The text is virtual, but this view draws on the thought of material texts as a primary category. From now on, I regard printed texts as secondary. I am a Native Web Cyborg. An embodied intertextuality is more effective since it is easier to expand. Storing texts in our minds takes a lot of energy. Not much is left to make connections and expand. A disembodied intertextuality grows more slowly.

Authors have always mixed explicit and implicit interconnectivity in their texts. Literature has more implicit connections and research texts are mostly about explicit connections. James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922) is an example of an ordered chaos of connections of various degrees of transparency. Even if the word intertextuality was not coined when Joyce wrote Ulysses, he worked intently with textual connectivity as a tool for communication with the reader. The traditional method of research builds on textual connectivity, which is both explicit and indented, i.e. the reference system. The reference system is meant to be as explicit as possible. Still, as a Librarian, I have seen numerous references which could be said to have a broken link to the original. By calling it broken, I mean it misses crucial information and therefore is hard to follow to the source. The reference becomes ambiguous, since it is only indirect. There is no direct pipeline to the source. A hyperlink is both direct and explicit and cannot be ambiguous. Either it works or it is broken. The direct intertextuality of the Web is material for the CI machines. These hybrid entities take human voices, gradually spinning more complex webs for each instance of participation. This works partially as well as universally. Local CI machines at sites like Amazon.com, Last.fm and Ebay spin their local nets and universal CI machines like Google sweeps the whole net. Universal CIMs collect material untouched by Local CIMs, and material already within a context spun by local CIMs. In time, this process will render intertextuality with immense depth and complexity.

In modern and postmodern critical theory there has been a strong tension between intended and unintended intertextuality. The debate has often been about what an author means, and/or what a text says without the author’s intention – and even whether it is right to speculate on what an author might have meant without us having an explicit knowledge of it. Can a text say something by itself? In Death of the Author (1977), Roland Barthes suggests there is not one author of a text, no originality. All texts are connected in the intertextuality and individual expressions of texts are only instances of that intertextuality. This is an interesting thought, but I would like to switch roles in the metaphor. On the web, we all become authors. In this meaning, the word author has nothing to do with quality. An author in the Web 2.0 context is someone who participates. This participation might be ranking a book at Amazon, writing in a blog or just letting Last.fm “see” the music you play in iTunes or Winamp. This far, CIMs have only been able to work with explicit, intended information, but as the Artificial Intelligence entities become more and more effective perhaps they will be able to work with implicit material. The blogger Richard MacManus uses the concept ReadWritable of Web 2.0, meaning that a Web 2.0 service needs both authors and readers to participate in the creation of a particular knowledge web. It also means openness; a Web 2.0 document or entity should be bidirectional.

[1] The stories in Burning Chrome were originally published in the sf-magazine Omni before it appeared in Neuromancer 1984. It was through Neuromancer the concept Cyberspace became widespread though.