Shaping the Flow of Media

I recently started using a social note-taking tool called Clipmarks. Clipmarks is a tool that allows users to organize and transmit information. It is a modern form of collaboration that allows users to “clip” parts of a web page that they find interesting. You can save your clips to your own online clipmarks space, add your clips to your blog, email your clips to others, add clips to social bookmarking sites such as delicious or print your clips. When you install clipmarks a small icon in embedded in the toolbar of your browser making it easy to multi-task as you clip parts of websites as you browse.

When you clip something you “tag” it. Tagging is an evolving social practice that allows uses to add their own searchable metadata, such as keywords, to their clips. Lankshear and Knobel (2007) call this a “bottom up approach” because the user makes the decisions about how to classify information instead of relying on a pre-established hierarchal system. This makes the exchange and sharing of information more “fluid, continuous, open” (Lankshear & Knobel, 2007, p. 15) and less “expert-dominated” (p. 9).

You can also create catalogs for your clips and make them public for others to search, view, or add comments to. The fact that others can add comments to your clips makes this a relational technology. The fact that clipmarks was designed for users to share their clips publicly shows that the developers understand that “learning is an individual phenomenon and a collective phenomenon…understanding that learning and development is a bi-directional phenomena” (Kaptelinin, & Nardi, 2006, p. 91).

The ability of social networking tools such as Clipmarks is shaping the flow of media. The ability to tag is revolutionizing the way we use the web. In a print world there were top-down hierarchical standards such as the Dewey decimal system on how information was classified. In the past the designer or author might give keywords to a web-site. Now, the ability to tag allows a bottom-up organic approach where the individual user has the ability to create keywords, categories, and libraries to categorize information in ways that make sense to them. In other words they control the flow of the media. The ability to share these tags with “my clippers” allows you to add a social network of others who have similar interests. Again this is allowing the users a new way to flow media and information to one another.

References:

Knobel, M., & Lankshear, C. (Eds.). (2007). A New Literacies Sampler (Vol. 29): Peter Lang.

Kaptelinin, V., & Nardi. (2006). Acting with Technology. Boston, Massachusetts: MIT.