At the end of chapter 8 Weinberger, with the help of German philosopher Martin Heidegger, says "The meaning of a particular thing is enabled by the web of implicit meanings we call the world" (170). The hammer example helped make this statement more clear. We only know the meaning of "hammer" because of the implicit (context or background) meanings . If we didn't know what it was used for, we wouldn't know what it was. Weinberger and Heidegger make it clear that in order to understand what a hammer is, we have to know more and that more comes from the implicit web of relationships.
This is related to the third order of order because that implicit web of relationships is growing and people are adding more relationships that are not only meaningful to them, but that are meaningful to others as well. Tagging is becoming more and more common and it is only increasing the web of relationships. According to Weinberger, "We are building this connected miscellany link by link and tag by tag. Its value is in the implicit relationships that turn into an infrastructure of meaning" (171).
More (RedOne Jimmy Joker Remix) - Usher
http://www.flickr.com/photos/59273738@N03/5429023674/
Hmmm, just to play devil’s advocate a little I might say that even if we didn’t know what a hammer was for, we would or could have some idea of what it was. It would just be an understanding that is out of sync with the accepted social construction of the meaning of a hammer. We might be totally missing the point and purpose of the hammer (and thus perhaps miss out on a lot of its meaning), but we would have our own implicit associations with it. Like say the Large Hadron Collider, even without a really solid understanding of what it does, most of the world still has implicit meaning associated with it (generally involving black holes if the Google auto-complete is any indicator). Granted the LHC is a lot more complicated than a hammer and we don’t end up with very accurate meanings perhaps, but still.
ReplyDeleteI like the song that you picked; very energetic. I’m sad that your map isn’t in a bigger picture, can’t quite tell the associations apart from basketball (or maybe it’s all basketball and I’m just dim?), but them’s the breaks I guess.
I think it is pretty obvious we are going to understand what a hammer is, but i wonder about other things? like if we are curious how to woodshop a table, or do a science experiment for class, the internet is going to be the resource we go to and its explicit meaning is all we are really going to pay attention to. Now if someone was blogging about how making the table made them feel about their childhood spent making tables with dad, that would be implicit, and helps people connect on a more personal level. The internet and a computer to extension would be able to put those two links together because they are both related to table making, though they deal with two completely different meanings related to it.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to quote myself from one of the other blogs here and say:
ReplyDelete"Heidegger's hammer example seemed pretty overblown to me at first, but after thinking about it, if you were coming from a perspective of knowing absolutely nothing about hammers, people, wood, nails, etc. then you would need to know that humans are incapable of driving nails with their minds or constructing whole buildings out of fundamental matter with their will alone in order to understand what the point of a hammer is."
The "infrastructure of meaning" idea is a solid one - we're building a semantic database for our own purposes - explaining what the significance of an object (or idea or song or book) is: not just in its nature but in how it relates to everything else. I think a vast database of these connections is one of the tools necessary to produce actual artificial intelligence... If a computer doesn't have some way of testing its assumptions, it can't be trained to think in meaningful directions.
It was hard to see your song meaning web thing, but I'm assuming it was a few images that reminded you of the song? anyway, a lot of us reused the hammer example in our blogs (including me) but another good example I saw from someone was a pencil. Some people see it as a tool to write, but others may see it as a way to make art. It all depends on the individual. It is important for each individual to look at things in different ways because if we didn't everything would just have one meaning.
ReplyDeleteYour use of this quote is really well done: According to Weinberger, "We are building this connected miscellany link by link and tag by tag. Its value is in the implicit relationships that turn into an infrastructure of meaning" (171).
ReplyDeleteYes, and this is why tagging and the implicit/explicit is so important to Weinberger when thinking about the 3rd order.
I too wish I could see your image a bit more clearly--maybe a short description about it would've helped?