I found this really compelling, both in form and content:

I gave my take on the long-term ramifications of this in earlier posts Beggar’s Canyon and Optimism. What really struck me about this video was the idea that HTML tags define the form, while XML tags define the content. So when text from an XML document is exported, it can be classified and formatted by any number of disparate machines. That’s why I can have a blog, because I can just fill in fields in a form, rather than having to understand what a MySQL database is, or how to create one.

I also enjoyed the idea of the users of the Internet teaching the Internet about ideas that only humans can have. What is a hyperlink if not one person’s definition of the relationship between two realms of information? And with machines powerful enough to process those definitions in the aggregate, the Internet becomes an über-democratic negotiation about the nature of meaning. It’s a step beyond Wikipedia, where anyone can visit to add or revise content. It’s Google News, which proactively aggregates news stories from thousands of sources worldwide.

What about pictures? How can we really search for images, when computers can only see them in pixels? Some people tag their photos, but that’s just a start. Enter schemes like The ESP Game in which players log in and are randomly assigned an anonymous partner. The pair is then shown images and they have to come up with words to describe each image. Once they agree on a word, they may move on to the next image. They win if they can label a certain number of images in the pre-determined time. It’s packaged as a game, but what it’s really doing is finding humans to complete a task that computers can’t do, which is label a large quantity of images, so that they can join this network of information.

Some might be troubled by the thought of the “average” person defining the nature of information. Don’t we have specialists and experts who constitute a small minority of the population, but who can give us a much richer understanding of their field of study? Yes, and as their influence grows, we will be able to identify and access them much more easily through the shared mind of the Web. And they, in turn, will have greater access and ability to share their ideas with a wider audience. It will be a pure meritocracy.

There’s a website, FaceResearch.org, that allows you to digitally create the average of a number of different faces that you select or upload to their site. They discuss the hypothesis that the more average a face looks, the more attractive it is perceived to be. This may be partially because average faces tend to be more symmetrical and have smoother skin. But it’s a wonderfully egalitarian idea, if you think about it. The most attractive among us may not be any one of us, but may just be the average of all of us.

Web 2.0, then, may ultimately be a way of taking the average of all of our conceptions of the world and finding the most attractive face, the essential truths of human understanding, heretofore locked only within our collective unconscious. And then we may say, along with John Keats:

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 10th, 2007 at 8:52 pm and is filed under Information Literacy, Technology, Video, Visual Arts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.