1 Matching Annotations
  1. Sep 2015
    1. we must either distinguish or be hopelessly fuzzy. And is this bad, is it an inhibition to have to work our way though documents before we can talk about whatever we desire? I would argue not, because it is very important not to lose track of the reasons for our taking and processing any piece of information. The process of publishing and reading is a real social process between social entities, not mechanical agents. To be socially responsible, to be able to handle trust, and so on, we must be aware of these operations. The difference between a car and what some web page says about it is crucial - not only when you are buying a car. Some have opined that the abstraction of the document is nonsense, and all that exists, when a web page describes a car, is the car and various representations of it, the HTML, PNG and GIF bit streams. This is however very weak in my opinion. The various representations have much more in common than simply the car. And the relationship to the car can be many and varied: home page, picture, catalog entry, invoice, remote control panel, weblog, and so on. The document itself is an important part of society - to dismiss its existence is to prevent us being aware of human and aspects of information without which we are impoverished. By contrast, the difference between different representations of the document (GIF or PNG image for example) is very small, and the relationship between versions of a document which changes through time a very strong one.