Alan Liu wrote:
> That is, the Semantic Web isn't really being engineered to "mean,"
> semantically or culturally. It is being engineered to "do."
That's it, exactly! This implies that we have three fields at stake
here: being, meaning and doing. I agree that the Semantic Web is
basically of the order of doing (that is what happens when books are
'talking to each other' on the semantic web).
But. But the non-coincidental discourse and vocabulary in which the
Semantic Web dresses up imports stuff from both being ('ontologies',
'ontology') and meaning ('semantic'). I would say that this is more than
just connotations, more than just metaphorically speaking - it is
'metaphorically doing'. This is what Katherine Hayles has called
'material metaphors', metaphors which do not so much connect/intermingle
two or more symbolic/semantic concepts, but which connect a concept to a
material device, which is able to act in the world, change some state of
affairs (that's what computer icons and buttons are doing when we
read/operate these material metaphors). In other words, material
metaphors connect/mix meaning and being by doing.
Meaning does not reside in being, it is always an effect of doing,
usually conducted by humans (interpreting, comparing, connecting,
associating cognitively), but these kinds of doing become more and more
delegated to code, algorithms, scripts, software. People and machines
joint together are doing these things, thus producing data clouds (cf
tag clouds, blogosphere, or Google's cloud, but also more delineated
clouds as MySpace or Nettime). The Semantic Web aims at making more
'sense' of data clouds, interconnecting knowledge domains and ontologies
on a functionalist code level, arranging and aligning them in order to
'do more'.
What remains is the question: do these data clouds belong to the order
of being, the order of meaning, or the order of doing? I suspect all
three together.
And yes, indeed, that would bring cultural criticism of the Semantic
Web, the utopian Semantic Web and the pragmatic Semantic Web on the
same cloudy level...
Alan, thank your for your elaborations (and references)! This really
upgrades my thinking ( I am working on material metaphors and what I
call the data cloud dispositif, trying to give Kittler some 'air' :-)
Marianne .
> In the manner of the web-services or information-agent concept, it is being
> raised as a very smart swarm of animals that can follow data scents through
> thickets of data silos (confusing to humans because each uses different
<...>
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