Spinning Webs

Things always fit together in the strangest ways.

Trying to clarify some stuff about Vygotsky for a presentation I need to do for Composition theory class, I stumbled upon a paper that really set the synapses to firing. Spinning Webs of Significance by Martin Ryder is a great piece that draws on Activity Theory to explore some implications for the web.

There is a social quality inherent in a web document which is as gregarious as a puppy in a public park. Occasionally an author may receive email feedback from interested patrons. But much more often, feedback comes in the form of referring hypertext links from other web documents. These links reveal the contexts in which the artifact has been appropriated within the work of others. By following the referring links that form around her web document over time, an author can extend her own inquiry to another level, tracing the connections that weave a networked community of interest.

Though it's not an unfamiliar argument, for some reason I never really thought of the Internet as unleashing the power of citations. The key difference, I think between citations and their variant on the web, links, is that citations are never used as an end in themselves, unlike links which are often the only thing present in web logs. It's a sort of stunted model of learning, in that respect, because if a person only links without commenting then there is no additive value to the knowledge. I never thought of writing on the web as solely a collecting activity, a sort of electronic age hunting and gathering, but some web logs really seem to be just that. However, collation has its values too, so I suppose you could think of it as a coming of age for bibliography as well. The problem is teasing out the difference between the two, because the web has joined them in a rather odd partnership. I much prefer finding original content, real human artifacts, rather than links to other content. But the rise in bibliography is striking. That is perhaps it's only real coherent structure, a natural effort to contain its incoherence.

The World Wide Web is arguably history's largest human artifact. At the Millennium it is a collection of nearly one billion electronic data objects. Web documents are extremely volatile. They are easy to create, easy to change, easy to move, and easy to destroy. Web objects can be preserved or replicated at little or no cost. The Web has no coherent structure. There are no rules governing its contents. Yet skilled users can locate any Web object within seconds using commonly available tools for searching.

The article's concluding thoughts on community are particularly insightful into the frustrations of this elaborate implementation of "distributed cognition."

Web communities of the type described here are very loosely constructed. They form naturally over time with little to bind them together beyond their common interests. The objects that attract the largest communities are likely to be boundary objects. These are, by definition, pliable and loosely constructed, and the communities that surround them are made up of people with diverse interests in related subject domains. The advantage of a larger community is the redundancy of information as a means of self correction in complex systems. The disadvantage is the obvious lack of discipline or control. Subjects admit themselves into the community often without their conscious knowledge of the affiliation. They are included without pledge or promise to add value to the collective knowledge base, but they are admitted on the sole assumption that a link they have made to your own site carries a promise of some common interest. The advantage of such informal structure is the totally uncontrived and overlapping presence of the participants and the novel contexts which they bring to the community. The weakness of this approach to collaboration is the obvious lack of organization and control. While providing information collectively, the activity system leaves it to the individual subject to assess the value and veracity of any retrieved information and to work around transactions that are incomplete.

It's so weird to find stuff about the web and rhetorical and educational theories so much one and the same. It's kind of cool though, it makes it easier to keep it all straight.