RSSConteXt is king
Put together on April 14, 2008 6:19 pm by Dimitris
What do you think?
I think I’m not alone in believing that within this constant stimulation from all sorts of media one of the most sought-after objectives is that of context. In other words, it really is of little importance if you routinely read hundreds of RSS feeds, keep yourself up-to-date with all major developments on the news (radio, TV, newspapers, etc) and so on but fail to understand and actually appreciate the content of all this information.
The Metaphor
To me, trying to find the context of things is like finding where each piece of the puzzle fits in a constantly changing picture – that of my everyday life. Building on that metaphor, everyday we grab a handful of pieces from the ‘world bag’ and put them in our ‘personal bag’ – usually without thinking about it. Then, from time to time we look into our bag and try to make sense of what pieces we have and what image they make up. Such times come for example when someone asks us a question or when we want to decide on what we make of a certain event.
Ok, so what are those pieces that go from the ‘world bag’ into our ‘personal bag’? They ‘re our experiences of the world basically. Something we read, see or hear on the web/TV/radio/street, a discussion we have, etc. But also more broadly speaking our senses: a touch, a smell, an emotion at a random moment, physical activity (e.g. sports, sex, dance, etc) and the list goes on…
The Problem
Now bear with me while I get a bit (more) philosophical. Obviously, since they’re so broad and varied, it’s very hard to fully define our experiences – and get a clear picture of what’s happening. And letting the scientist in me emerge for a minute, it’s even harder to measure or ‘quantify’ let alone consciously process and fully understand them. Technology and in particular digitisation has both broadened the spectrum of our possible experiences and at the same time partly helped us cope with the overload. Think for example photography and its digital equivalent of the JPG image. It does wonders to our memory, but also falls extremely short – considering how *not* so well it can capture your thoughts or emotions from said image. That bit is still entirely up to us – perhaps thankfully.
Its scope
To make matters worse, you can’t just ignore large parts of the world and its stimuli just to simplify things. That’s, well, cheating because context is precisely about the big picture – not pieces or even ‘thin slices’ of the puzzle. So one might argue that we need to think at least broadly, if not globally. On the other hand, context is an individual issue: my ‘context’ is entirely different than yours – even if we happen to be twins. Thankfully, that alone ’simplifies’ the question from the impossible-to-answer ‘a universal perspective of everything’ to the somewhat-more-feasible ‘my perspective of everything’.
The next question sure to come up is why ‘everything’? Why do I care about what’s going on e.g. in Greek sports? Should I be interested as far as I am concerned? Or will it really have no value whatsoever for me? If so, some ’slicing’ is necessary: I can just get rid of anything that’s Greek sports-related from my stilmuli. After all, that’s what puts the ‘my’ in ‘my perspective of everything’, it’s what makes me distinct from my hypothetical twin brother. Still, had I taken the time to bother about Greek sport, I might have eventually found it interesting. It would then become part of my interests and perspective. So, kind of obviously, the degree of ‘everything’ one wants to include when talking about their context is rather personal.
Parameter time
Now, add to all that the parameter time. The whole process needs to be repeated regularly to actually make any sense. Also, time changes how we perceive pieces of the puzzle (enter memory) which essentially means that finding a context obviously involves building on the past as well. It’s more like putting together a photo album, rather than viewing a running video.
It’s all external anyway
However, even if somehow technological advances help us overcome such difficulties (and I’m being totally theoretical here), all such experiences and their ‘logging’ is something external. It all is sitting somewhere outside us. Once it’s been created it still has to be taken in and ‘processed’. Basically, we need to put the pieces of the puzzle at the right place, discard useless bits, reveal hidden connections etc.
And your point is?
Now, I’m not just being philosophical here. Right now – with most (although definitely not all) input reaching us through digital means – we’re already quite close to having what I am describing here: a rather tangible heap of data sitting somewhere outside us waiting (unpatiently) their turn to be ‘processed’. And to sum up the previous points, although the ’sitting outside us’ bit is unlikely to change any time soon, it would be very helpful if the information we are about to consume and process was presented to us in one place, in an organised, in-scope, personalised and time-structured manner. I’ll try to describe how this can be achieved in practical terms in the next post.
tags: analysis |
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