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01/06/2005 Archived Entry: "Del.icio.us"

Del.icio.us
Although I read Del.icio.us links all the time, yesterday I finally set up my own bookmarks with the site: http://del.icio.us/drfabulous (linked also on bottom of blogroll). The move from reader to producer, a small but still significant move. I'm drawn into the social bookmarking - public announcement of what I'm reading/read, the always-available-world of information (open browser/click) as public, rhetorical gesture. More indications of how far the digital has taken us out of the private readerly experience - St. Augustine shocked (or was it he who was shocked?) by silent reading. “What on earth is that man doing???” And as I start prepping for the semester ahead, I am re-reading yet again Ong's Orality and Literacy - the notion of the index as print navigational device stands out. The index ideologically establishes the ways we organize patterns (linear and in the back of the book). Echoes of a Stallybrass talk at UF years ago that wonderfully took the index moment through various Medieval representations of reading.. . . the Medieval mind signifies our ancestor of thinking (“this goes here”). The Web is initially founded on the Medieval principle (first page of a website is index.html). But the Del.icio.us model is obviously much different. Now we are getting closer to the shifting digital mind which functions outside of straight-up indexing or private contemplation.
This is what remix culture is about - a point made mainstream in the online (maybe print too?) New Yorker by the very online Sasha Frere-Jones. The individual author unsettled by the mashup. Of course, mashups will be mainstream too eventually (the inevitable task of composing – co-option? Maybe. I prefer back-forth influence; we learn from the corporate, they learn from us too). And then we will have endless debates over whether mashups unsettled the status go or re-enforced hegemonic practice (THE END OF THE MASHUP). But before I get too bored by such talk and premature suggestionulation, Del.icio.us and mashups and much more reflect digital thought. I bring these two writing practices together because they are both indicative of what is at stake when we pretend digital culture works otherwise; we become stuck in index mentality. Privacy. Remember McLuhan? Global Village? The global village was meant to shift the private models – not to a world of “can’t we all just get along” but a mashup world where information collides in all kinds of unsettling (and thus, also settling) ways. To compose is not to be private, not to be indexed, not to be static. And – it is to be suggestive, for mashups suggest the “what if” principle of digital thinking (what if Christina Aguilera and Metallica got together?) with the suggestive allure of book marking (“hey, want to see something?”).