First enquiry: Control and power
The first stream of research looks into the role of metadata in the decrease and increase of control. Folksonomies based on tags by users are often heralded as a form of decrease of control and decentralisation of power. Whereas metadata was formerly thought of as something that had to be pre-organised in a structured and often hierarchically organised ontology, which furthermore was organised by a central agency (think here of a library or an archive in the classical sense), a folksonomy is a loose and ‘ flat’ structure that evolves out of the input of tagging users.
But not only metadata becomes looser (in part). Additionally to this, metadata (be that in the form of ontology or folksonomy) takes over the role of other forms of control: Think of the shift from time-based programming on television (which is, as we all know, one of the key points of media power) to, what we might call, ‘ user-generated programming’ on Youtube. To take another example: The Japanese social networking site Mixi includes the application Mixi Station, which automatically extracts usage metadata of Itunes and the Window Media Player, aggregates this metadata, and feeds it back to the users in the form of collective daily charts, which are based on the amount of times a piece of music is played – and not how often it is bought. Users decide about the charts not anymore by buying, but by listening.
However, these forms of wider and different distribution of power and loosening of control are at the same time matched with new forms of control and new forms of accumulation of power. Particularly striking examples for new forms of control can be found in some of the new versions of Digital Rights Management, which are deeply embedded in the single piece of content itself (e.g. via MPEG 7 or MPEG 21). Such metadata can decide about who can use the content when and how. It even enables the documentation, thus surveillance, of the usage. A second example: New forms of accumulated power might be found in the small and open communities of ‘metadata geeks’ (quote from an early interviews). Such communities are at the moment at the forefront of the creation of the new ontologies (e.g. the ‘ Music ontology’) that develop the semantic web, other communities use such ontolgies to accumulate metadata.
‘Ontology’ means in computer sciences something slightly different than in philosophy. Both Computer Science and philosophy (before Kant) see ontology as the study of being qua being. However in Computer Sciences, an ontology is simply a relatively low level (that is: basic) form of taxonomy. Normally such computer ontologies are organised in hierarchical knowledge trees. There can be many different forms of ontologies for different purposes – to put it in the language of computer sciences: an ontology is always one form of ‘ specification of conceptualisation’ (Gruber 1993) -, and they often sit on top of each other. In philosophy, the idea of ontology is situated more deeply - some philosophers would argue: in existence itself. Aristotles‘ idea of ontology, for example consists of 10 categories of ways something can ‘ be’ (as substance, as quality, etc.).
The communities of metadata geeks might not be the power that Aristotle had, when he came up with his ontology, shaping in this way Western thinking up till today, but this (dodgy) comparison might still point to the fact that there is power in the creation of ontologies. Nowadays, such communities of metadata geeks operate usually with an ethos of open source and free access, but they nevertheless order segments of the world not only for themselves, but for everyone who will follow on their footsteps.
Our initial hypothesis is that we might witness a shift to a new regime of media control and media power. The centre of control is not anymore only the in the access to the database to it. Now the access to the single piece of data itself is controlled, and new forms of power might be found in the participation in the collective creation of ontologies that drive the semantic web. Such an initial description of this shift is yet to be elaborated.