The Beached Whale

I was somewhat taken aback by the Murray essay.  The writing was highly technical and full of references to other works that I haven’t read (they’re AFTER the introduction) so I didn’t really get much out of it.  To me it doesn’t seem logical, on behalf of Murray, to work on the assumption that the readers of this introduction will be able to understand much of her essay.  Perhaps it would be more effective in some respects as a conclusion.  I read some short stories by Borges in Spanish last semester so I’ll be interested to see how his writings connect to New Media.  The way in which this essay relied on a lot of previous knowledge reminded me of the Honors College’s summer reading, The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism and the Future of University Education, a book intended for college freshmen but written in such a complex, dry, and technical manner that few people, if any, in its intended audience would be able to appreciate and understand it.

I appreciated Manovich’s essay more in that it was accessible to me.  I did not really see any one definition of New Media as being the correct one but I thought they all worked well to explain the many facets in different ways.  It seemed that both authors were conscious of the fact that new media as it exists now has far more potential than is being realized at the moment, I would agree with this.

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, (who, it should be noted, didn’t really conceive the technology or idea, but did a much better job of getting it off the ground than his predecessors) says this of Wikipedia:

“Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.”

This lofty assessment of what Wikipedia is destined to become, taken from the donations page, is a nice notion but I don’t think the rapidly-expanding Wikipedia is even headed in this direction.  The major problem with Wikipedia, in my opinion, is an issue that I think is prevalent in most outlets of new media, and it’s something that limits it from reaching its full potential.  The Wikimedia software was developed by technically minded programmers, and its main bank of contributers are similarly technically minded – editing Wikipedia requires substantial knowledge of Wikimedia’s unique “Wiki code” – and the community is built from people who have the time and devotion to spend countless hours updating and expanding the site for free.  With some exceptions, these aren’t people likely to be particularly knowledgeable in all the areas that a good encyclopedia should cover, and Wikipedia’s content reflects this.  Not to mention that whereas other encyclopedias seek to include a basic knowledge of a given concept, Wikipedia tends more toward as much information as possible about any given subject that contributers are interested in.  As a result, Darth Vader is afforded a very long article, longer than articles for some U.S. presidents.  Though Wikipedia is relatively well monitored, preventing spam from remaining for long, uncited sources are prevalent (sometimes marked as uncited – this doesn’t stop people from reading this information, however) and the occurences of defamatory falsehoods has led to criticism from journalists such as John Seigenthaler Sr..  While the concept and technology behind Wikipedia seems sound to me, it draws from a heavily internet and technology-conscious group of members, and experts in most fields are not likely to be a part of this group.

More on this to follow…the final product got to be very long so I thought I had better divide it into two entries for clarity’s sake.

~ by philip on January 18, 2009. Tagged: baylor_nms_s09