antipopper

Thinking aloud: a few months ago, my supervisor offhandedly suggested that I could “create some sort of tool” as part of my research on blogging and “marginality”. Having let that brew for a while, I’m now thinking seriously about developing some software to dramatise the concepts deployed in my thesis. I’m interested in taking the metadata of the blogosphere to the limits of its own intelligibility, in order to create unexpected pathways and revaluations. It develops a line of speculation I tentatively offered in my BlogTalk paper:

If the Storybox participants can generate “neveryday” vocabularies in a wayward negotiation of their (pre)conditions of trauma, perhaps “information design” can, too. What this could involve remains to be seen.

RSS/Atom aggregation and folksonomic tagging will play a large part in this, coupled with my old flirtation with “automistake” functionality and the cybernetic unconscious. And perhaps it could help unpack the strange discussion that we had at BlogTalk about “protecting the Long Tail of the blogosphere”.

My move to software has also been lubricated by Samuel R. Delany’s “modular calculus”, a conceit with which he underwrote his self-deconstructing sword-and-sorcery series Return to Nevèrÿon. In Damien Broderick’s words, Nevèrÿon is, narratively speaking, “a generous, self-subverting machine for modelling practically everything mundane and contentious in our contemporary epistemic and social order”. Just what we need for neveryday life! But Delany also invests playfully in a dodgy scientific rhetoric that gives this vision a kind of cod-coherency, and this is where the software comes in — as an algorithmic generator of strained metaphors, a water balloon of strategic truth-identity that bursts on impact. Mysterious? It is to me, too :)…

[ tags: affect, aggregation, blogging, blogtalk, folksonomy, metadata, nevèrÿon, programming, research, samuel-r-delany, social-software, software ]