Blog #5

Main Point:
The main point is to introduce you to the concept of convergence culture through a few examples.  Jenkins says that the book is about the relationship between media convergence, participatory culture and collective intelligence.

Quotes:
"From his bedroom, Ignacio sparked an international controversy"
"Each of us constructs our own personal mythology from bits and fragments of information extracted from the media flow and transformed into resources through which we make sense of our everyday lives"

Real World Connection:
When Jenkins discusses how a Bollywood film in 2004 was distributed via cellphones, that reminds me of iTunes U and how now students in some schools can attend a lecture without leaving their room.

Connection to Weinberger:
Jenkins and Weinberger both appear to be explaining things to us that we already know, suggesting that college students in technological fields are not their intended audience.  Also, they both discuss how different forms of information are changing the world and leading us into a new era.

The end of Weinberger!

So, what was the point of Weinberger?  He asks at the beginning and the end of the book if everything is miscellaneous, why doesn't it stay that way?  He then spends the entire book arguing in some ways that things should stay miscellaneous, and others that they shouldn't which left me confused.  Towards the end, he said that we work towards understanding and that in a conversation, we are looking for understanding and not just knowledge.  Maybe his point was that as he said, the third order leads to meaning, and that metadata and Web 2.0 are the understanding whereas the old style of books and encyclopedias are simply knowledge, not what people are looking for at all.  He also says that metadata scares people because order is lost and I think that is true to a certain extent, but will only be temporary.  I think younger generations growing up with metadata won't be scared of it, like DTC majors now.  We're not scared of wikipedia, or urban dictionary, or sites like digg.  In fact, some of us choose those websites over more reputable ones because we like the way information is stored on them better.  Metadata has become an important part of our lives, whether we like it or not.

Blog #3

Chapter 8:
Main Point:
While tags help organize information online, no matter what these facts say you will never know the whole story behind the picture/video/wikipedia article etc.  He says that these things may seem like they're saying nothing, but these tags are just as important as the warning on a blowdryer telling you not to use it while you're asleep.

So What?
Weinberger discusses how in the third order we externalize meaning, not just identifying features and facts.  He's saying that as the world becomes more miscellaneous and as Web 2.0 expands the problem of not really knowing anything beyond what something is based on its tags is being fixed.  As a DTC major, I should care about this because Weinberger is saying that our field is imperative to preserving the meaning behind things cited online.

Chapter 9:
Main Point:  I feel like the main point in Ch. 9 is pretty much the same as the whole book.  Weinberger explains how having infinitely more information available to the public is changing the world, in this particular chapter he discusses how on the web messiness goes to a whole new level that make the way we "know" things completely different.

So What?  This matters to DTC majors because many of us will be working with/designing things like websites where it's very important to keep the things Weinberger discusses in mind.  We thing from our cultural viewpoint, but others might not and the internet is international and not specific to American culture.