the power of names, naming, and knowing names in digital culture

I was just trying to look up the grammatical rules for a certain construction in English wherein two nouns are used together to refer to a single entity. for example, "Computer Science" is such a construction, as it uses the noun "Computer" and the noun "Science" to create a new noun. I started off googling "multiple word noun," "multi-word noun phrase," and similar variants. somewhere along the line, I recalled that this construction might be called a compound noun, and sure enough, that's the right name.

there are plenty of times where, through iterative searching, you can figure out the right search terms to use to find what it is that you're after. however, there are certainly other instances, like this one, where if you don't know the name of something, you can't find out anything about it. there are lots of situations where this difficulty arises. if you want to know the name of the artist who painted a famous work, it's difficult to search for the work itself, even if you know exactly what it looks like, without knows its name (presumably, you could browse various galleries and archives, but now you've circumvented needing to do a search). similarly, if you saw the symbol for British pounds but tried to search for "L with a line through it," you wouldn't get very far. interestingly, though, search "O with two dots" gets several hits for umlaut, making that one pretty easy to find based on the description.

not only does this have potential implications for designers (and users) of text-based search engines performing queries related to non-textual data, there are serious implications with respect to distribution and exercises of power. choosing a name for something is obviously a powerful act. however, knowing a name for something gives you power as well, but power of different sorts. the power of reference, the power of understanding, and, I'd argue, powers of searching and finding.

this line of thinking makes me wonder what other sorts of power come along with knowing names, especially in digital cultures where most digital knowledge-oriented activities and interactions are text based. it also makes me wonder how one might subvert the power of name-knowing. one possibility is, as a namer, choosing a name that is so general it does not refer with any specificity to the thing in question. another option might be something like google bombing, which makes it the case that knowing the name of something might end up leading you away from the thing. I wonder what other sorts of power relations might be involved in name-knowing, and how those power relations might come into play with different ways of naming and ways of knowing.

unmediated publics?

this summer, I've been spend a significant portion of my time doing some blog-related research. I don't want to blab too much about the specifics, but essentially it's a project that focuses on blogging from the reader's perspective and examines the role of the reader in the activity of blogging. if that sounds cool, let me know and we can chat.

what I want to talk about is something that's come up during our lit review. in reading other stuff about blogging, I came across this notion of mediated publics, particularly in some of danah boyd's writings. if I follow, it's the notion that blogs, SNSs, and other sorts of social (usually digital) media create means of public interaction that are in one way or another mediated. blogs create a method of being public, but that public presence is mediated by the digital medium in which it's manifest. similarly with SNSs, virtual worlds, or, I gather, most any virtual interaction.

however, I'm left with the question, does this imply that offline, face-to-face, physical interaction is unmediated? on the one hand, sure, I'd be willing to buy that. in most (though certainly not all) cases, people aren't using a wearable heads-up display or interacting with a physically collocated person through some sort of digital intermediary. however, on the other hand, there are lots of things other than digital media that mediate our social interactions. (as a side note, there are interesting etymological relationships between medium and mediate, but as much as I love an etymological interlude, I won't go there at the moment). perhaps it's just because I've got activity theory on the brain, but I can't help but think of the Vygotskian notion of mediation. daily activities and interactions of all kinds are riddled with all sorts of mediators: language, culture, history, the physical environment, and even to some extent our bodies mediate our activity. indeed, any and every activity is mediated by something; unmediated activity simply does not occur.

I'm not saying that the notion of mediated publics is not a useful one. I think it is, as I think it draws into focus important ways in which virtual interactions are mediated by the medium in which they occur, fact that can be lost in some analyses. however, I think it misleadingly implies that physical interaction is unmediated. since pretty much all activity is mediated in some form or another, mediated publics might be something of a vacuous term. I suspect the term "digitally mediated publics," though somewhat more verbose, better captures the topic at interest. if what's really of interest is any sort of mediated public interaction, then, since all activity is mediated, what we're talking about here is really any sort of public interaction, and I don't think that's the point. I think the point is to look at the way that digital mediation affects public interaction, comparing and contrasting it publics that are mediated in other, different ways.