My Cornell stats read: Junior, Nutritional Science (CALS, major), Food Business (CALS, minor). My interests lie in combining a science discipline with a background in business/economics. I started a Food blog the summer of my Sophomore year of high school. I enjoyed writing, baking, and eating at new locales, so I combined them into this blog: Minor Gourmandry. I no longer update it. My fans have gone.
I also co-host Nude Beach on Slope Radio/TV. Featuring interesting music to dance or color to.
As for internet-based activity, I find the phenomena of collaborative networks extremely appealing. The possibilities of Web 2.0 (and 3.0, the "semantic web") are seemingly boundless, as the structure of the internet grows into a smarter, faster, and more capable iteration. I suppose Wikipedia is a good example of the key "folksonomy" concept of Web 2.0--the idea that hordes of interconnected but random/anonymous users can collaborate in a grass-roots fashion to create a larger whole--but the magnificence of the concept is sometimes bogged down by temporal debates, e.g. academia vs. Wikipedia. The real brilliance of Wikipedia is the willing labor force and the ostensibly democratic medium -- the concept, on the whole, eludes Wallace's presentation of the individual self on the web. The vast majority of contributors do not earn a red cent to edit, write, translate, and publish the articles on the site. The are motivated by the whole product, the collaboration, the furtive glamour, and more. The oddities are many: there is no dyadic social interaction (no CMC), no individualized benefit, and an emphasis on the big picture (which is a rarity in of itself).
The concept of remote, open source-based collaboration will advance the pace of development of any project that finds it way onto a server and onto the web. Open source web platforms, where many people have the editing tools, will, I believe, will allow for a digitized library of textual, visual, auditory, and other sensory information. I see a time when Google Earth's NYC, for example, is a picture perfect representation of the physical city -- each gallery and storefront detailed in high-definition. And in this digital city, you can enter a store, and browse and purchase its latest products. All vendors, all public areas: named and identified and linked.
Only a openly collaborative web network will allow for the web to evolve in such a direction. Each contributor, each citizen, would need the tools to upload pictures and digital information. Anyone can contribute, everyone will benefit. This is the open source web model.
2 comments:
I think you made some great points regarding the previously unimagined scope of projects that are both undertaken and successfully completed by the "open source" community. It certainly would have been very difficult for Wallace to have predicted this new level of collaboration between strangers.
What amazes me even more than the shear size of this collaborative community, is the number of people who maintain willfully ignorant of these massive and groundbreaking projects. Just recently a poll was conducted which showed that (by a large margin) Americans think that television is a more important and influential medium than the internet. Also, I think it's fair to say that at least half of the country remains more or less ignorant of the open source movement and these other collaborative projects.
This will have to change if someday we want Google Earth to have that picture perfect representation of NYC with each building and storefront accurately reconstructed.
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