Life in the Network

I found this week's assignment a bit tricky. First was the task of finding a subject of which I have a beyond average understanding of. Then, in finding that subject, I had to find some piece of information that the previous myriad of authors and editors--probably more qualified than I--had missed. I have studied Ojibwemowin, or the Ojibwe language for many years and naturally it is something I thought, if anything, I know a bit more about than the average person, being that it's a dying language anyhow. So I found the Anishinaabemowin Wikipedia page and browsed over it. For a general article it was pretty well written. Another challenge was that the article was written more broadly than my understanding stretches. For a language like Ojibwe, there are many, many different dialects, and I am only truly proficient in a few, while the article mentions and describes a fair amount. So the areas I could contribute to were significantly cut down. If you look at the History link, you'll be able to see what I added. And the sentence, while I feel it crucially important to an understanding of the features of Ojibwemowin, could easily be omitted. Especially when most of the other contributors, like myself, are probably well aware of it. But, I think I slipped passed without contradicting anyone else's feelings because no one has messaged me or discussed my changes despite the fact that the discussion of the article is very active currently. I feel the entry as a whole was well done and (perhaps due to the subject matter) completely avoided any anti-neutrality. With a language like Ojibwe, the speakers and scholars are truly a tightly knit community. I actually know some of the other contributors, or have met them, and that is something I find time and time again in the Ojibwe community. There is the common cause of keeping the language alive and the egotistical-scholarship issues that may come into play with other subject matter seem to be regularly absent from the discussion. It is also very encouraging to see Ojibwe scholarship taking advantage of new technologies. If anyone is interested, here is a link to my Ojibwe teacher's blog. He took a Utilizing Technology class in his master's program and is quite proud of all his new skills. He just got a laptop and a laser-pointer too. Just as a side note, the word for laser-pointer in Ojibwe is Waasakonenjigese-izhinoogan (wah-sah-ko-nayn-jig-ay-say-izh-in-oo-gun) which literally translates to that which points in light. Gas station is Wasamoobimide-adaawewigamig which translates to fire motion store. Thought maybe you'd enjoy a little Ojibwe etymology as long as we were on the subject.
The readings were great this week. I especially enjoyed the Digital Maoism article. I found the arguments extremely poignant to our times and specifically the parts where Lanier speaks of the dangers of collectivism and the hive-mind. I think the one of the most telling passages was:
The Wikipedia is far from being the only online fetish site for foolish collectivism. There's a frantic race taking place online to become the most "Meta" site, to be the highest level aggregator, subsuming the identity of all other sites. I am a user of many of these meta-sites and I didn't really look at it in the way Lanier is framing it, but truly, property on the internet seems to belong to whoever you end up passing through to get to it, rather than who's name is next to the text. I am a user of a blog-music aggregator that scans blogs for uploaded music and then allows users to listen to them and build playlists for free. But to be honest, I've never actually used it as a pass-through to reach the blogs where the music is coming from, rather I simply listen to the music I like and move on. In this way, sites like these seem to be quite ambiguous in their benefits for all involved. Granted, they bring traffic to all they aggregate, but as in my music aggregator example, they sometimes simply borrow other people's materials and bandwidth by accumulating so many outbound links they become a super-source of sorts. Kind of reminds me of Walmart and their technique of carrying everything under the sun, eliminating the average consumer's need to go anywhere else. But I hate Walmart, and I'm not alone. The only difference is, online meta-sites are a bit harder to criticize--or more accurately--recognize, as a problem. Why might this be? Perhaps it has something to do with the generation that is probably most accustomed to using such sites. A generation raised on Napster pirate-ism. How much is information worth? I don't know, but it is surely significantly less than twenty-five years ago. And while information seems to belong to everyone in cases like Wikipedia, doesn't the bottle-necking Lanier wrote of seem more like an information monopoly?