An interesting statement was made here in a discussion on the attribution of photographers.
“who told me” becomes more important than “who made it”. Sandra Snan
The whole interesting back-story to this discussion, and the quote was passed on to me by Kristina Alexanderson (Yes, she of Stormtrooper fame) and the words have stuck. Have we come to this? Is it really more important to source things by the person who spreads information than the creator?
Certain libraries, archives and art museums have certainly been in this position (where the collection is more than the individual creators) for some time. But this is a question of collecting and aggregating. Does it really apply to the fast moving flows of information online.
One of the truisms of the digital age is that we have moved from an era of information scarcity to an age of information surplus. What does this mean?
Take the example of Television. It has evolved from a limited number of channels to more channels than most can follow, in addition to view-on-demand services and a whole pile of online viewing options. The content on YouTube alone is mindboggling: 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute (http://www.youtube.com/t/press_statistics).
This change in access to culture changes the ways in which we relate to, and consume cultural expressions. We can longer, alone or with the help of others, maintain any form of useful overview over the content. This situation is aggravated by the huge number of alternative sources of material (other video sources), in addition to the large number of other sources (texts, still images).
With two many creators vying for our time and attention the role of the information organizer becomes more interesting.
The increase in information has also created a challenge to many “scientific truths”. Not a day goes by without the media reporting from several scientific studies proving one thing or another. With alarming regularity these scientists are contradicting each other.
Actually in many cases they are not really contradicting each other but much of the nuance and understanding is lost between the laboratories to the media. Ben Goldacre’s excellent book Bad Science is a good place to begin to explore this.
So if we are drowning in information, without the tools or the time to carry out rigorous background checks the question must change. If faced with a choice between Truth and Relevance. The answer used to be truth, but today its relevance. This is particularly true in the shift from blogging to microblogging. In blogging we followed the source, the producer of information. In Twitter we follow the people who point at the most interesting things.
What will this mean for academics, libraries, archives and society in general might be interesting to think more deeply about.
I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.
I’m often frustrated with the hype in the blogger community that “you must must must always credit the blog you personally happened found it on”—what I call “the ‘via’ circus” and rarely is it mentioned whether or not you should credit the original upstream source.
Phrasing it through your lens of Truth v. Relevance, the revelant thing should obviously be the very blog you’re reading it through right now, while the true thing would be the upstream source. The blog you happpened to get it “via”, be it Daring Fireball, Digg, Boing-Boing or somebody’s Twitter, seems neither.
To make a bad analogy, academics would look silly if they refrained from sourcing books and journals instead put heavy emphasis on which library they learned their ideas in.
I suspect that the reason that the blogosphere were so worked up about via attributions is because it’s the hand that feeds themselves. Part of their work is sifting through, and cherry picking, the information overflow, and if someone just copied that work they might steal their niche. “If Marco started posting exactly the same links as Gruber, Gruber would be in trouble”, I guess the reasoning works.
I don’t buy it. I don’t think the appeal of a “copied curation” is very high so I don’t think there’s a big risk of curation being devalued.
Secondly, I don’t think it’s always that much work, either (though it can be sometimes). Bloggers do put a lot of time and energy in writing articles, making images and other things and that’s valuable, but the curation part, the linked-list part, is something that every procrastinator that happens to use a good bookmarking tool (or even a bad one, like delicious, facebook or twitter) generates almost automatically.
The “sifting” process is not an ex cathedra operation from a single illuminated source.
It’s something that many internet users just participate in without need for much thought—we see our various friends’ sifts and leave one behind ourselves.
So when I wrote “‘Who told me’ becomes more important than ‘who made it’”, I wasn’t agreeing that it should be more important, I was simply lamenting that notion.
Thanks.
Hi,
Different information practices apply in different media. As an academic my research is often presented in journal articles and naturally follows a completely different logic. But even here I find following a prestigious journal is no longer adequate to knowing enough about my research area. Nor is it enough to follow individual authors… they are too many and too diverse to make this method possible.
So to enable an understanding of a subject we need the information sorters. Among the most efficient of these are collections of human actors who are interested in pointing to interesting sources.
“So to enable an understanding of a subject we need the information sorters. Among the most efficient of these are collections of human actors who are interested in pointing to interesting sources.”
Of course. It’s an important job but when we, by participating in the “via” circus, are elevating specific curators above the rest, even talented ones like Gruber and Doctorow, we are, I believe, underestimating the power of peer-production and the complex system of sifters and meta-sifters that we are part of ourselves.
It’s like eating a bagel and crediting a specific poppy-seed instead of the maker of the bagel.
I found this very essay of yours from a friend who told me on jabber that I was quoted there. How about I credit him for the text and neglect to credit you? After all, “who told me” is more important than “who made it” these days…
(And don’t get me wrong, I’m digging on the CC/FSF/GPL stuff generally.)
HI,
I disagree that its like crediting the poppy-seed, but I really liked the metaphor.
So for me the whole thing is actually that it would be ok for me if you credited your friend on jabber. Sure I produced the text but he/she is more relevant to your information finding. By praising him/her you are not diminishing me or my contribution.
It may be that we are talking about different perspectives: If we see it from the point of view of a specific cultural artifact, text, image or whatever this may seem unfair. But the point is that this text (and almost all individual works) are relatively unimportant (most of the time) so the person who helps us find material is more important than the actual creator.
If I was to disappear you would not notice. But if your friend stopped pointing that would seriously effect you information flows.
BTW I also hate the whole via circus.