The first chapter of Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger focuses mainly on order and flexibility in the digital world in comparison to the physical world. In a bookstore, the customer has the opportunity to just browse the books of his own free will, sometimes without knowing what in particular he is looking for and which is not whatsoever desirable and affordable for the bookstore owner. On the other hand, In the digital world such as in the online iTunes store, although the designer has given the customer the chance to arrange its purchased song tracks in any way he deems advisable, he restrains the customer by giving him certain order of options to browse. “The problem isn’t that iTunes has chosen an inappropriate set of criteria for sorting, although that certainly could be argued. The real problem is that iTunes accepts the premise we’ve had to operate under in the physical world: that there is a set of appropriate criteria.” (10)
My reflection to the above discussion would be the presence of “more implicit authority” in the digital world than the physical world - the idea that although the digital world gives us more freedom and ease to search and browse items, it has its own restrictions, which cannot be overlooked. A customer in a bookstore, can tell the salesperson, with a smile, that he is just browsing, indirectly asking the salesperson to “buzz off”(8) but in the digital world there is no such browsing and there is no such way to ask the Webmaster to buzz off (unless one is a hacker, of course)! You are in the Webmaster’s territory, and have as much freedom and options as he has set for you.
El,
ReplyDeleteI think you bring up a concurrent theme that concerns our digital world in writing about the restrictions inevitably built into the digital world. We see this clearly in iTunes, where you buy a coded file that is done so with the explicit purpose of preventing sharing. And isn't sharing a tenet of all the major religions?
These built-in restrictions exist in so many realms of the digital world, e.g., operating systems, programs, and copyright and licensing issues that seem to arise everywhere.
If the internet was envisioned as a democratic space, where access to information was supposed to be a democratizing force: why all of the rules and regulations? And worse, what will happen if the internet becomes a monitored, restricted and regulated space? (Ehem, like in some countries...)
You bring up a good point that even though the internet allows us more freedom than the physical world, there are restrictions. You mentioned Webmaster and it reminded me of adwares and other tracking devices, which follows our activities online. We are never completely alone online and we can't tell it to "buzz off".
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