This week, there are two important concepts that have been highlighted in the lecture; aggregation and distribution. In addition, as the technological world is becoming more interconnected and intelligent than ever before, more things become surfaces and platform for publishing (Lecture 11).
One of the reading for this week draw our attention towards a book entitled ‘ Making is Connecting’, written by David Gauntlett, Professor of Media and Communications at the University of Westminster. In his book, he wrote about three key ideas concerning the reasons of why making /creating something is highly associated with connecting:-
1) Making is connecting since you have to connect things together (materials, ideas, data) in order to come up with something new
2) Making is connecting because creativity involves social interaction and dimension which connect us with other people
3) Making is connecting because through making things and sharing them at the global scale, we improve our engagement and connection with our social
( Gauntlett, D. 2011, p.2)
In my opinion, all the ideas are acceptable and can be better explained in relation to things around us, including the process of publishing. A good example to describe these points is the stages involved in publishing a case study or journal articles.
First of all, researchers have to find relevant information and data in accordance to the research topic. This can be achieved through literature review, interview, questionnaire and other data collection methods. Thus, unrelated materials are linked together and connected to form new meaningful information, which is quite similar to the first point above. Next, if researchers come up with the idea of investigating a topic that have never been examined before, he/she have to ask for other people’s viewpoint about the idea. Expertise and scholars in the appropriate field are the best people to give advice and viewpoint. Therefore, researchers have indirectly interacting with epistemic communities around them. After that, when the research is accomplished and research paper have undergo peer review process, it can be published for the benefit of other members of the society. Over recent years, large amounts of case study are available in the internet. In other words, more research papers are being published at global scale, rather than just regional or national level.
Other than that, the concept of ‘making is connecting’ can be associated with the theory of aggregation and distribution. Aggregation involves the process of gathering, combining, and brings anything that can be clustered together. In addition, a new relationship and new form of organisation can also be established through aggregation. Hence, aggregation is quite comparable to ‘creating ‘and ‘making’. Furthermore, distribution deals with spreading and sharing of materials through different platforms. Nowadays, news and current affair are the most common information that are being distributed, whether by printed or digital media.
However, in certain cases, publishing of confidential information of a particular organisation could pose harm and danger if the information falls in the hand of wrong people. This is actually one shortcoming of Wikileaks. Simply put, not all things can be made available to the general public, thus drive the need for data filtering and stricter regulations in distribution of information.
Last but not least, this video illustrates the flaws in our current distribution process. Surprisingly, these errors have a significant negative effect towards our environmental wellbeing.
Reference:
Gauntlett, ,D. 2011, Making is Connecting: The Social Meaning of creativity, from DIY and knitting to YouTube and Web 2.0, Polity Press, pp. 1-14
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