John Brown and Paul Duguid make some interesting points below in their article 'The Social Life of Documents':
"The French sociologist Bruno Latour points out that a primary characteristic of documents is their mobility (the other is their immutability). Documents quickly pass beyond the reach and protection of their maker and have to fend for themselves. A central challenge, then, is to engage the interests of the community they are intended for. As the number of documents multiplies dramatically and their reach is extended by information technology, the challenge of engaging an intended audience grows too. The swelling number of documents and the shrinking amount of time available for each one raises the problem of what Richard Lanham calls the "economy of attention," evident as much in the diverse envelopes of junk mail, each with a separate strategy for getting read, as anywhere else.......
........The central issue here is for the intended audience to be able to recognize documents intended for them.......
......In an increasingly crowded attention economy, the challenge of reaching an intended audience accounts for the demand for sophisticated Web-page designers and the importance of autonomous agents on the net that can plant links in strategic sites. Despite this work, with most links and pages, it's still very hard even to make even a reasonable guess at the intended audience. This difficulty may reflect an implicit assumption by many that documents have universal appeal or that content alone will marshal an audience. Yet if the overall form appears unclear, few will linger over the content, especially given the ease with which links allow people to pass by".
I have endeavoured to remain concious of these aspects while preparing my Resource Project annotations, by including all the relevent information in a short block of text with highlighted headings and links where appropriate. The hope is that readers can make a quick, informed judement on the relevance of the annotation to their search.
"The French sociologist Bruno Latour points out that a primary characteristic of documents is their mobility (the other is their immutability). Documents quickly pass beyond the reach and protection of their maker and have to fend for themselves. A central challenge, then, is to engage the interests of the community they are intended for. As the number of documents multiplies dramatically and their reach is extended by information technology, the challenge of engaging an intended audience grows too. The swelling number of documents and the shrinking amount of time available for each one raises the problem of what Richard Lanham calls the "economy of attention," evident as much in the diverse envelopes of junk mail, each with a separate strategy for getting read, as anywhere else.......
........The central issue here is for the intended audience to be able to recognize documents intended for them.......
......In an increasingly crowded attention economy, the challenge of reaching an intended audience accounts for the demand for sophisticated Web-page designers and the importance of autonomous agents on the net that can plant links in strategic sites. Despite this work, with most links and pages, it's still very hard even to make even a reasonable guess at the intended audience. This difficulty may reflect an implicit assumption by many that documents have universal appeal or that content alone will marshal an audience. Yet if the overall form appears unclear, few will linger over the content, especially given the ease with which links allow people to pass by".
I have endeavoured to remain concious of these aspects while preparing my Resource Project annotations, by including all the relevent information in a short block of text with highlighted headings and links where appropriate. The hope is that readers can make a quick, informed judement on the relevance of the annotation to their search.
Web Resources:
"Internet Communications Concepts Document." http://webct.curtin.edu.au/SCRIPT/305033_a/scripts/serve_home (accessed April 18, 2007).
Brown, John S & Duguid, Paul. "The Social Life of Documents." May 6, 1996.http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue1/documents/ (accessed April 18, 2007).
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