What’s a Meta For?

[Note: I’m sure I didn’t make up that punning headline.]

Dave Rogers weighed in with a response to the blogthread (see Akma‘s entry and my response to start with) about metaphors for the Web by telling us about C.S. Lewis’ concept of transposition “when one attempts to adapt something of a higher or richer medium to a poorer medium.” That’s why, Lewis says (Rogers says) we can’t describe heaven: as we transpose it into terms we can understand, it loses its richness. “Could it be,” Dave wonders “that we have actually made a ‘higher medium’ that we cannot adequately explain in our ‘poorer medium’ world?”

This is a provocative idea. I think the evaluative terms get in the way, though. We could drop the “higher” and “poorer” and still use the idea of transposition to explain why we have trouble describing the experience of the Web. There are ways, obviously, in which the Web is a deprivation of the real world: five senses reduced to one, almost purely verbal, sedentary. That’s how the Web looks to people who think that it’s making us less social. (Hah!) The Web, it seems to me, is making us more social but also differently social — relationships mediated through keyboards are necessarily different than ones in which two people are close enough to breathe each other’s air. And you are not going to get me to say that one is better than the other.

So, what’s the richness of the Web that the RW can’t appreciate any more than it can appreciate heaven? While it would be self-contradictory to expect a full answer (“Please utter the unutterable in 100 words or less”), we need some type of answer since the Web isn’t something we can only experience by dying. Daniela Bouneva Elza at LivingCode suggests that it’s the “superculture” described by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen in Figments of Reality. A superculture knits together multicultures “like genuine multicellular organisms,” say Black and Cohen. I don’t know that I find this particular metaphor all that helpful, but Daniela sure seems right in pointing at the realm of culture and sociality as the Web’s locus of ineffable richness. Culture, society, even civilization. These seem like good words for discussing what we’re building on the Web.

(By the way, I really like Dave’s explanation of why the Web’s space and time are so utterly different than the RW’s. And Daniela’s passing use of the word “extelligence” struck me; maybe too cute to stick, but there’s something right about it also. IMO.)

Categories: Uncategorized dw