Connections
Are you familiar with James Burke’s wonderful series, “Connections,” shown on PBS and The Learning Channel? I was pleasantly reminded of the show after a mild “Burke-ian Moment.” No, I didn’t happen to connect the dots between Napolean and the development of the modern computer (the latest question on Burke’s Knowledge Web Project), I did, however, receive an e-mail that prompted a search for a professor at Curry, then led me => the Curry faculty gallery => another faculty member => that person’s Curry page => that person’s personal website => a page he had just shown me today. The significance of this “connection” story lies in the fact that today when Steve asked me whether “page x” loaded, I made little of it (he’s forever creating cool stuff), but when I saw the same page IN CONTEXT, as an integral part and extension of his personal site, everything fell into place…I connected the dots, I saw the whole!
I wanted to comment on how much I liked the design of the WHOLE. Alas, there is no place from the personal page to “contact” the doctor. I expect that my rather circuitous comments will come to his attention as there is little that escapes his ever watchful eye ;->
Note—the personal website mentioned above has changed and now looks like this. I liked the old one better…. 9/14/08
Technorati Tags: connections, social networking, k-web
March 17th, 2006 at 9:01 am
Indeed, one wonders whether we are driven by resolve, or fate, or something more akin to a willful randomness. Burke’s stuff always gets me thinking about that, and for a few days afterwards, I’m hyperaware of when it happens. We’ve all been there – it’s those “I was just talking about this earlier today with…”
This is the first of several points worth noting here. Your comment describing when you connected the dots makes me think a little of the photomosaics floating around the web, each of which depicts an image made up of smaller images, almost always of the same subject. I imagine beginning by looking at a single picture, and then pulling back to see the larger mosaic. It’s not much of an extension to imaging pulling back again, to see that that mosaic was just a “pixel” in another image (or that the original “starting” image was made up of such pixels itself). It’s a recursive thought experiment, but I’m constantly finding real-life parallels to it.
This all gets at the importance of context, the inclusion of which isn’t necessarily an inherent strength of the web. Admittedly, one of my pleasures is to stumble across a random and relatively “deep” section of someone’s site, but I usually do what you describe, Michael, and back out to the “root” to see who’s presenting information.
I don’t know that that practice is common, especially among younger, native web users. And that worries me just a bit, but I can’t exactly say why.
Finally, I’ll add some contact info to my page