The official verdict is out. Surfing the web for relevant content or in the hopes of serendipitous content discovery IS an Aesthetic Experience, period. That is, we are looking for information-objects of beauty. The experience of information serendipity is akin to the sublime in art. I explain.
We are hearing more and more being spoken with regard to relevance, content discovery, and the assuagement of one's information needs. We also hear much on the subject of information noise. What is information noise?
Well, we know what noise is. Currently, our definition of information noise is usually UNWANTED INFORMATION, i.e. unwanted information present in your social stream. So in a sense, YOU are NOISE to me.
That is to say, there are Twitter users whose posts I don't like reading: They are not beautiful, hence they are information pollution / information noise. We even speak of "cleaning" one's Twitter Feed.
So we're speaking of an aesthetic experience, and the way I see it, when we speak of cleaning our social stream, or keeping it tidy, we're really speaking about social standing.
What do I mean by this? What I mean is that we're trying to control what kind of information reaches us, partly by cleaning up what digital channels will NOT reach us. We are choosing kinds of information that we do NOT want to see in our social stream.
In a sense, we are also categorizing PEOPLE in terms of Sound information and Noisy information. We are therefore classifying people as being either Good or Not Good (i.e. Good or not Good FOR ME).
So a different kind of filtering is taking place. We're not just talking about information filtering anymore: We're talking about an aesthetic filtering of PEOPLE, because PEOPLE in the end are attached to these Twitter or Facebook or other accounts.
It's normal to want to control one's "listening station", to get the kinds of information we prefer, and none can doubt that surfing the web for information is a matter of taste. But it becomes an aesthetic problem and a very serious ethical debate arises out of it.
How can I judge a human being as being either informative or as being information noise? I can classify INDIVIDUALS as satisfying my information needs or NOT satisfying my information needs. This is horrible, though, the consequences are terrifying. I can dispose of individuals as though they were garbage, and believe me, the effect is felt. You try being rejected as a POOR SOURCE of information. You will be ignored, rejected, put on the Black List, and you will feel alienated.
So for the most part, this kind of "social filtering" of people is really unethical. We speak of our egalitarian society as righteous and virtuous. Yet we classify and label people as good and not good. Noise, in the digital information channel, is bad. It is UGLY. It is a matter of taste, but when taste labels & judges individuals, it becomes a serious ethical problem of VIOLATION and TRANSGRESSION.
Just as a piece of information that satisfies my information need is seen as RELEVANT and BEAUTIFUL, it also transgresses the norm of what is UGLY and NOISY and NOT USEFUL, or NOT INTERESTING. The same goes for the uninteresting, it violates that value we hold so dear, those values indelibly linked to the labelling of our individual experiences of the Information Highway as beautiful, true, and good.
Yes, we are actually seeking the Good, the Beautiful and the True, and are labelling people this way in the process. But an individual is neither good, nor beautiful, nor true, nor is he or she the opposite of this. Humans are just what they are. They can be annoying, but really when one takes offense, one is usually looking to be offensed.
So this, for me, is the final verdict on the experience of surfing the World Wide Web. It is a matter of aesthetics and aesthetic taste, and a seriously unethical matter of FILTERING PEOPLE as objects of knowledge. And so a question arises with regard to the liberal art of Saving-Face: To put it politely, we're looking for social standing, and the judgment of others, as to our aesthetic beauty, goodness, or truth, is profoundly important to us. Services such as Facebook permit us to gauge the responses others have of us, so it works to keep us in check. Like the Liberal Arts in the 17th and 18th century in England, the Liberal Arts serve a public function of promoting the civic virtues. We are doing the same at present: We are using each other to promote civic virtues. Relevance and Utility have become civic virtues, and others can take on the Face-Wasting role of lacking in civility. More to come on the subject of Face-Saving and Face-Wasting (i.e. The Antiface Strategy).
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