Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Paolo Mangiafico: The Social Life of Information

I really enjoyed Mangiafico's presentation and thought it was very interesting. I thought it was especially clever how he described "knowledge as an iceberg." Above the water is explicit knowledge, the kind that has been printed in books for centuries. Underneath however, there is this greater mass of knowledge, which lies within people and their practices. It is this information that we, as a society, need to make accessible to the public, as a wholes. This is related to Pierre Levy's definition of "collective intelligence" -- ("No one knows everything, everyone knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity").
I particularly enjoyed Mangiafico's examples, such as websites including delicious, citeulike, WorldCat, and LibraryThing. On these websites, instead of information being just published, as it was done in the old days, information is being shared. It is clear that these types of websites are extremely efficient. Mangiafico also introduced the concept of "collaborative filtering" that these various websites engage in. Through engaging individuals to participate, the websites are more effective in producing results that are favorable to the overall audience (ex. Digg or Slashdot).
Lastly, Mangiafico's presentation related to Shirky's speech. Shirky illustrated that people are wasting time (by watching tv, etc.) instead of actively participating to better technology. Mangiafico provided examples where individuals, who probably thought were wasting time, were actually benefiting society through participating in these online projects.

1 comment:

  1. Yes, isn't the iceberg metaphor interesting. People used to use it to refer to the individual consciousness, but now we can talk meaningfully about a collective unconscious that doesn't seem just mystical but pragmatic and possible to make visible!

    ReplyDelete