on IA for the WWW ch. 20 & 21; Web Theory, ch. 1

The primary take-away from the example of the development of MSWeb is the applicability of traditional library and IT solutions, but with room for maneuvering. This is repeatedly mentioned across both chapter 20 and chapter 21, in regard to Microsoft’s work as well as that with evolt.org, as evidenced in Morville’s summary, “MSWeb’s ‘three taxonomies’ approach is steeped in traditional library science, which isn’t surprising considering the backgrounds of many of those on the MSWeb team. But it’s important to note how willing the team was to abandon the traditional library science concepts that didn’t make sense in the intranet environment. For example, the team did not try to create ‘traditional’ thesauri for its metadata schema and category label taxonomies. Other standards familiar to the library science community, such as Dublin Core, weren’t initially adopted…” (Morville & Rosenfeld, … p. 437).  Perhaps evolt even went beyond maneuvering away from typical IS/LS, as Morville pointed out the ability to completely disregard traditional IA rigor and procedures in order to come up with a usable product–though it is worth cautioning that the members of this community were all conversant with IA so to some extent, thus might still have a will toward organization consistent with IA practices, even if the functions were distributed.

References

Morville, P. & Rosenfeld, L. (2006). Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (3rd ed.). Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly.

on Web Theory, chapter 1

According to the introduction of Web Theory, Burnett and Marshall’s book attempts an analysis of the history and development of the Web by approaching it from a variety of ways—first of which is through technological determinism, specifically through the theories of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan.  In the brief explications of Innis’ communication theories (time-bias vs. space-bias), and of McLuhan’s ideas about the (1) medium as the message (“content of the new medium is filled with the forms of the past medium and takes a period of time to establish its own reorganization of content”), (2) the global village, and (3) an electronic collective consciousness, (Burnett and Marshall, 2003, pp. 17-19).  After Innis and McLuhan – and a gloss of the attempts of contemporary scholarship to recuperate Innis and McLuhan as either predictors or commentators on the Internet and Web—is a segue into primatologist Donna Harraway’s explorations of the cyborg as a method of addressing breaking down barriers between human and machine, (or, as between humans and the Web).  Again and again, Burnett and Marshall (2003) present theorists and ideas of technological determinism as limited in providing a full exploration of the complexities of the birth and growth of the Web; in fact, the first chapter presents a dominant narrative about the Web, (as revolutionary development, p. 21), as well as a possibility for a counternarrative that considers the Web as having been “actually built on and intensified many existing institutions, social needs and expressions of desires,” (p. 21). Exploring ‘the story of the Web’ from a number of angles – as this book intends to do, as stated in the introduction – obviously leads into two significant approaches for understanding the Web and its transformative effect on society, the ‘loose Web’ and ‘Cultural Production’ theses,  (Burnett and Marshall, 2003, pp. 2-3). I look forward to delving deeper into cybernetics, as well as the intersection of cultural studies as a set of theories and practices, and the Web.

References

Burnett, R. and Marshall, P. D. (2003). Web theory: An introduction. London: Routledge.