New Media and the Layering of Perception, Observation and Creation Doctoral Meeting - Friday May 19th 2006 - Room B106 - Université Paris 8 organized by Leo Caldi and Bernhard Rieder contact: bernhard dot rieder at univ-paris8 dot fr 10:30 - 12:00 First Session   Leo Caldi   Laboratoire Paragraphe, Université Paris 8   Ethnomethodological Metaobservation and Visual Communication   Imar de Vries   Institute of Media & Re/presentation, Utrecht University, Netherlands   Metahistory as Means to Uncover Meta-Memes 12:00 - 13:00 Lunch Break 13:00 - 14:30 Second Session   Mirko Tobias Schaefer   Institute of Media & Re/presentation, Utrecht University, Netherlands   The Tagcloud. Metainformation as Collective Production   Ever Reyes   Laboratoire Paragraphe, Université Paris 8   Meta-Writing: Re-Structuring Web Content from a Semantic Perspective 14:30 - 16:00 Third Session   Marianne van den Boomen   Institute of Media & Re/presentation, Utrecht University, Netherlands   Metaphors of the Metasphere   Bernhard Rieder   Laboratoire Paragraphe, Université Paris 8   Metatechnologies – Towards a Technical Layering of Meaning? Leo Caldi, Laboratoire Paragraphe, Université Paris 8 Ethnomethodological observation and visual communication The concept of reflexivity is a central idea of Ethnomethodology. In "Studies in Ethnomethodology", Garfinkel criticizes the external position a sociologist takes when studying interactions, communication and ways of constructing meaning in a group. For Garfinkel, the sociologist's observation cannot be ignored, for it is part of the observed events. Ethnomethodology thus claims that researchers have to come into and become members of group, playing a double role as observer/participant, if they want to grasp how a group constructs meaning through interaction. In most studies, reflexivity is applied the following way: a) the researcher keeps a log containing only descriptions and accessible accounts b) he afterwards adds an "observation layer" (which could be called "metaobservation") taking up on the notes again, retracing the observations made, identifying possible bias or prejudice, looking at herself as a member of the "village" of meaning. This process of adding layers can be repeated indefinitely. We propose to show why and how this method can help to device a research method in graphic design that is based on Ethnomethodology. The main idea is to allow the designer to take the user's/consumer's place and at the same time to permit the user/consumer to become a creator. Both designers and users/consumers are members of the village and participate in the construction of meaning, with the designer giving "final form" to the product. To illustrate our proposal, we are going to present a series of case studies that can be seen as proponents of this model. Imar de Vries, Institute of Media and Re/presentation, Universiteit Utrecht Metahistory as means to uncover meta-memes Paradigms, tropes, memes, topoi, dispositifs; there is an abundance of ways to describe somewhat generalised categories of discursive formations, itself another conceptual approach to account for the 'grouping' of cultural 'things' or 'entities'. These descriptions find their origin in different theoretical debates and can be used in comparable as well as very dissimilar argumentative structures, but all have in common the need to demarcate some 'frame' in which objects, themes, styles and concepts of statements (as described in Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge, 1969) can be grouped and then studied on the transformations these groups go through. As discursive formations exist in specific historical, cultural, socio-economical and political contexts, tracing their transformations -- creating a geneology -- inevitably generates distinctions between the 'old' and the 'new', the pre- and postcondition of a heterogeneous field. This yields two distinct but connected views on the relationship between the old and the new: first, there is the difference in what seems similar, and second, there is the similarity in what seems different. Recurrence, however, is part of both perspectives. All concepts named at the beginning of the first paragraph can be used for creating these double-edged views: the urge to do so seems ever-present, as if there is a meme about memes, a trope about tropes, a recurrent idea to formulate ideas about recurrent ideas. This exposes a paradoxical problem in new media studies: how to analyse recurrent ideas and promises -- while recognising the nuances and differences in these ideas and promises -- in media evolution without reducing the analysis to stating that 'nothing ever changes' or 'nothing remains the same'? In my presentation, I will focus on this problem by looking at how idealised ideas of communication, found in wireless technology discourse, resonate not only in other contemporary discussions on progress by cooperation and interactivity (as seen in the Web's upgrade to a new and better version), but (especially) in older discursive formations as well. My aim will be to trace the transformations in the thinking of transformations, to use metahistory to uncover the meta-meme. Mirko Tobias Schaefer, Institute of Media and Re/presentation, Universiteit Utrecht The Tagcloud. Metainformation as collective production With the emergence of Internet technologies summarized under the buzzword Web 2.0 user participation was pushed to a new level. Websites as del.icio.us, Flickr.com or CiteULike.org make use of meta information provided by the users themselves. The phenomenon of thousands of web users classifying, indexing or describing websites, links, photos, songs etc. was appreciated enthusiastically and labelled as social bookmarking or folksonomy, to describe the collective intelligence at work. In fact the actual act of information retrieval on the Internet got a new tool, the tag, a digital post it, added to a link, a website, a photo or a song. Although the W3 recommendations suggest adding meta information to websites and their content such as pictures, often these information are missing or not supporting the actual request. The promise of the collective act of providing meta data is to attach semantic information to the content published on the Internet. The act of tagging includes besides the description of content, a validation. It adds a second layer to the stored data, a layer that promises to revolutionize the way users search and deal with information. Instead of providing a paper to PUMS, I set up this work in progress which will address the phenomenon of meta information in Web 2.0. This includes an explorative research on websites and services such as last.fm, an online radio station, CiteULike.org, a social bookmarking service for academic papers, Flickr.com, the most popular website for posting and tagging fotos, and del.icio.us, a service for storing and tagging boomarks. The presentation at PUMS will summarize the literature on meta information in Web 2.0 and highlight the problems and expectations related to it. In my presentation I will describe tagging as a quest for objectifying the subjective, like personal taste and special interests. In conclusion I will argue that meta information for useful and efficent information retrieval will need communities that share the same interests and expect the same standards of the data they are tagging. In that way one could think about a man-machine interaction to define and to retrieve precisely the kind of pictures, texts or the tunes one was looking for. Social bookmarking would become a way to separate the wheat from the chaff. Everardo Reyes, Laboratoire Paragraphe, Université Paris 8 Meta-writing: re-structuring Web content from a semantic perspective The so-called Web 2.0 paradigm has not emerged without social involvement. One of its pushing vectors is about exchanging and communicating information following a publishing scheme. Current practices of web publishing erode and/or refashion intellectual and material needs that previously constituted an obstacle to create documents on the web. Today, users do not require programmatic skills to write content, nor to be equipped with servers and fixed IP addresses to publish it. From this point of view, the development of publishing systems on the web has tried, in most cases, to replace the HTML tags by means of metaphors with the intention to supply usability services focused on format. The main disadvantage of these services is a lack of semantic perspective that may allow authors to structure content in order to render documents discoverable, manageable, reusable and meaningful. This presentation will, first, discuss modern web-based systems to author content and then, it will propose an experimental approach based on pre-defined document models, combining principles of structural computing and technical possibilities of XML. We will insist on the concept of "meta-writing" as writing about writing (writing that encapsulates other writing), including processes, symbols, methods, technologies and languages. Marianne van den Boomen, Institute of Media and Re/presentation, Universiteit Utrecht Metaphors of the metasphere Since the 90s of the last century the metaphor of ‘community’ has been used to conceptualize social dynamics on the Internet. Nowadays, with the advent of what can be called the scripted web, this metaphor no longer seems appropriate. In this paper I want to explore this scripted web, especially the blogosphere, and it’s implications for the metaphors we use to approach social and cultural dynamics online. The scripted web emerged when static HTML-pages became dynamic by inserting scripts, small routine programs which can perform actions on data components. Stripping the recent hype about Web 2.0, what remains is a relatively new web dynamics, based on aggregating and reassembling data components within and between web sites and/or databases. Though blog researchers are now trying to filter out ‘blog communities’ in the blogosphere, my claim is that we should refrain from this metaphor altogether because it is too space centered and too subject centered. The community metaphor, imported from the image of a pre-modern village, remains bounded to a bordered space and a distinct core group of users. Blogs, with their permeable volatile borders (created by hyperlinks, permalinks, trackbacks, RSS-feeds, and tags) disrupt and overflow this metaphor. I will argue that the virtual community metaphor can be linked to the concept of ‘protocol’ (Galloway 2004). Protocol organizes connecting and transmitting, and thereby creates network topologies and virtual spaces. This architecture enables community formation by facilitating users to produce their own discourse within these spaces. The scripted web can be analyzed as a meta-layer on top of these protocols. It parasitizes on protocological transmission and spatiality, but it’s primary function is rearranging data components. Contrary to protocol, scripting organizes data, not spaces, not people gathering, but data gathering. Yet, new social and cultural reconfigurations are produced. How should we conceptualize this? Websphere and blogosphere are persistent circulating memes, all pointing in the same direction: a gaslike volatile sphere of reassembling distributed data instead of a solid or even fluid space. Scripting can be seen as producing metaspheres. In the metasphere the social does not consist of communities of like minded human beings, but of meta-assemblages of heterogeneous actors: nested protocols, distributed data, layered scripts and user’s inputs. Bernhard Rieder, Laboratoire Paragraphe, Université Paris 8 Metatechnologies – towards a technical layering of meaning? The continuous proliferation of digital information, fueled by the computerization of information formerly stored in analog formats and the rapid production of new data and knowledge, has been going on for well over thirty years but it was only fifteen years ago that it started to channel into the integrated environment of the Internet. Today, the global network is a heterogeneous landscape of mostly unstructured information, and more structured approaches (i.e. ontologies, semantic web, etc.) are employed rather reluctantly. The main guides are still either humans or what I would like to call metatechnologies: software that filters, structures, and charts the information desert to help us cope and navigate. Metatechnologies can either be purely algorithmic like search engines or software agents, or hybrids that strive to take the best of both human and non-human. This second type has recently been pushed to the front by the Web 2.0 hype, surrounded by terms like collaborative filtering, tagging and collective intelligence. This presentation will focus on the notion of “information layering” as it pertains to the work of metatechnologies. The production of meaning and orientation will be described as the results of a permanent process of adding layers rather than based in detachment and overview. The prefix "meta", (higher, beyond, enclosing), indicates the relational dynamic of this process. We will pay special attention to the similarities and differences between technical and non-technical ways of meta-discursive practices.