digitaldust

Over the last couple of days I’ve had the strange experience of people (who are not Heather) talking to me about my blog posts. Mostly about the cats, even someone on the other side of the world coming up and asking me if we had a name for Burton. Yep, we do, he’s an explorer, named for Richard Francis Burton. And it’s quite apparent that no one comments on or talks to me about the turgid attempts at high brow posts I put up… those just seems to scare people. Just goes to show it’s the human angle every time, reality TV, not docs. Also, I’ve put some a couple of posts up in a bit of an un-reflective and unprofessional way, without thinking how they might be read from other points of view and in my new context as a lecturer. I took them down. So I’ve become painfully aware of the public nature of my blog. Only a very small public, I’m not claiming fame, just unfortunate recognition. I suppose that’s what one wants when blogging, but I had always sort of assumed that the only people who read my blog were Heather, Ed and my Mum… Hi Mum.

On top of that has been some discussion with a couple of people about what I would use Facebook for. Facebook (as well as many other social networking or social blogging tools) allows selective privacy/publicity. So I could limit my audience to people who might get obtuse jokes or forgive me for obsessive cat postings. However I consciously chose to join Facebook as a tool I could use to connect with students, not as something to keep up networks with friends.

But all of this raised again for me the whole social construction of knowledge thing. How meaning is constructed in a social context, and with very little to do with the content of the message. I’ve been thinking about both Facebook and the blogosphere in these terms over the last day.

Profile/Social Networking sites, like Facebook, run on this concept of social constructivism. The so called content is light, but they are not about that, they are about links to other people or saying what movies one likes. From the constructivist angle these profiles, when filled out, become very rich nodes in the framework due to their relationships, but not because of any unique or creative content. And from that point of view you cannot treat the individual nodes separately, you must always be addressing the whole. Or addressing big chunks, which is inherently difficult as there are no logical boundaries in these networks.

The same goes for the blogosphere. Most of which is not filled up with unique, new, creative content. Much of it is links other posts, which again are links to further posts, which might end up in some unique content.

So to me both these experiments in closed social networks and the open knowledge networks out there on the web seem to prove and should be read as socially constructed and intrinsically hermeneutic knowledge.