Annotating Experience

This blog by Jeff Jarvis (“The Annotated World“) is too interesting to relegate to Twitter posts. His interest, as the writer of What Would Google Do, is to point out how journalists can transition into the new digital world. A point he continually pushes is to think differently about the format in which information is presented. Thus his advice to get away from the “article” and to think more in terms of the constantly updated subject page. Another new form for information is bundled with his notion of the “hyperlocal.” Various technologies are coming out to allow us to view the world as if through “goggles” or “layers”:

To continue with Jarvis’ point, one should not think about a restaurant review as something that exists in a food section of a newspaper, but as something connected to the ever-growing folder of data pin-pointed upon a particular place.

My mind works more on the meta side (not being so intent on saving journalism). Take this, for example:

Rather than having to query a data base — how aughties that is – we will be able to point our phone — or whatever we call it — at anyone, anything, or anyone and get its story or ask about it or tell our own story about it. The challenge — which Google, among others, is attacking — is to organize all that annotation around the place, thing, or person.

It’s easy to overstate the newness of this. Being able to grab data instantly like this is breathtaking, but it’s not qualitatively different than looking through a good guidebook and figuring out what one is looking at. The mind has to do a few more cartwheels to project a standard Lonely Planet street map onto the world seen by the eyes, but that’s the only difference. This is how guidebooks have always worked: they provide a layer by which to understand the world. This layer involves stories or judgments about quality from some specific standpoint.

The experience itself is not new, but the immediacy of it adds a new level of uncritical acceptance. As the Jarvis quotation shows, someone or something is making decisions about the presentation of information. That presentation will appear to many as the natural way to see the world. The categories by which one organizes buildings, streets, and people will be determined by someone else. Success in business or any enterprise will come by fitting into those categories and thus coming up on the small screens in an attractive way. Again, we already do this categorizing in our minds; it’s precisely the work of our organic operating system (culture) to allow us to filter and see things. But Google and other companies in taking on this role are moving us to a new level of mental standardization. This eventually will become the universal guidebook.. and then it will become just the way the world is.

I’ve got a dislike for that process of standardization.. but as an academic it’s a rich subject. Guidebooks are a fantastic entrance to the study of culture because in the often impersonal choices of detail we glimpse the underlying categories and value system by which the world is understood. Reading a medieval guidebook I often wonder why this or that detail was important.. and inevitably there’s some point of cultural difference there in plain sight. And that’s why in my teaching “What Would Google Do?” could be an important question.. as a means to measure the difference between our own assumptions about the world and those of someone in another culture. And an app like Google Goggles could be as useful as a medieval guidebook in reflecting back to ourselves our own assumptions about how the world should be.