There are so many different ways of thinking about what it is we do. The paper that I’ve just finished ended up being more about literacy than I expected. It started out as an analysis of the Beijing ticketing scam and become so much more. It lead to all sorts of Thought Bunnies (TM) hopping in and out of my head.
Luke and I were rabbiting on the other day about fliters and conceptions and all kinds of framings and reframings of what we do when we’re reading on the web. We came up with conceptions as a kind of MetaFilter (but not that metafilter). We filter all sorts of things, piecing them together as we may. It just seemed that our research areas (Problem solving and Web stuff) were coming together, but we’re still not sure how.
We tried rich pictures and ended up with two conceptions of conceptions. There’s something here and it seems that reading web pages (or Flitteracy) is a problem that must be solved somehow by each of us, although there are many things that remain true (ish) for all of us.
And that’s where I get stuck. We have this problem of sense-making, which each of us do individually, but we also do together. The very nature of the web means that it is a communal ‘thing’. We flit from site to site and build our own rich picture of information, but what is it that propels us through this web. Is it a push factor or a pull factor? We could be pushed away because where we are is not living up to our expectations, or we could be pulled somewhere by the promise of something more shiny. Perhaps that’s why I like tabbed browsing so much. If something pulls me away, entices me with ‘teh shineh’, I can always find my way back simply by closing the tab. I can find a new path, a new way forward.
Heh, we don’t have an information superhighway – we have an information flitterway!
Thought bunnies has been trade marked! DRM! hahahahaha. I like the idea of flitterway!
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[...] while ago, I came up with the notion of flitteracy – the ways we make sense of information in an information-rich environment. I’m not sure [...]