July 9, 2009 at 13:33Content positioning
The behavior of people is context-dependent - we behave differently depending on the environment, the surrounding community with its characteristic behavioral stereotypes and cultural traditions, and on our role at any given time. For example, in conversations “in the kitchen”, expressions and ratings can be used that differ markedly from conversations on the same subject “in public places”. This habitual behavior model is transferred to the Internet space - people can lead to a non-binding talk in a forum or blog, but in places such as the media (including social) or any kind of authoritative platforms that imply an official and thoughtful position of the author, or in projects like Prozy.ru focused on "imperishable", the authors really try to express themselves more accurately and give out something in their opinion of high quality. Including comply with the requirements of the law, for example, on not inciting ethnic hatred, propaganda of extremism, non-desecration of the honor and dignity of individuals and so on. In other words, the context-sensitive behavior of people in projection onto the Internet actually means the dependence of the positioning of the content on the positioning of services containing this content.
However, in real life, access to information expressed in the kitchen is much more limited than to information expressed in public places. And on the Internet, most of the materials are stored and equally accessible, regardless of the cultural context. And formally equally subject to legislation. Such a formal approach gives rise to a conflict with prevailing mass practice, from which Gleb Pavlovsky concludedabout the features of the Russian-language Internet, in which it is not customary to answer for “words”. There is nothing to be done with formal legislation, except for the very energy-consuming and inertial procedures for changing it. Given the speed of the web’s evolution, it can be quite (not) ridiculous - the laws will become obsolete by the time they are adopted. You can expand the public debate about this. For example, officially recognize the dependence of the responsibility of the authors on the declared positioning of the Internet resource. Or associate a measure of responsibility with the composition of the audience. Write, for example, at the entrance “attention, the site contains materials that can offend the religious (political) feelings of Muslims (Orthodox, WWII veterans, ...)”. And let the Muslims (Orthodox, veterans, ...) decide for themselves whether to go to such a site or not.
Accurate positioning of the services that host the author’s content helps to ease the severity of social and legal conflicts. But the positioning of the content goes beyond the outlined problems; this topic is more extensive and interesting. Positioning is contained in the very nature of human thinking, language, communication - we explicitly or implicitly give a certain status to what we say. A person’s speech usually contains at the same time a whole set of positions associated with different relationships: argument, thesis, consideration, opinion, evaluation, comment, question, resume (the list is probably not complete. In addition, mainly “logical” aspects are listed here, but you can add emotional: threat, regret, compliment, etc.) As a rule, these are small forms; some of them are close in meaning and convey only its different shades.
The most, in my opinion, interesting thing about positioning is that they can give different “weight” to the content. For example, in a broad public debate on an issue, there may be millions of opinions, comments on opinions, and opinions about comments. Of course, most of these opinions can be grouped into a small number of groups, where in each group there will be almost no differences between the opinions. But the positioning of opinion itself does not imply its obligatory argumentation and can only express the emotional attitude of the author without any justification. With the comments in general the same. Therefore, the weight of opinion is the lowest; it can only be increased by the authority of its carrier. Another thing is the argument. In any discussion there are not very many of them, most often there are only a few. The weight of the argument is high, but this form is too short and usually cannot exhaust the topic. I would say that the resume has the highest weight - it sums up all the available arguments or even the lack thereof. Still quite “weighty" positioning in the thesis. Although he, like opinion, does not necessarily imply justification, he also claims to claim some value. This is a fairly authorial format, because a claim for value is often associated with a claim for public recognition of the author.
Usually in discussions both in “real” and on various Internet sites all these positions are mixed, which is why, firstly, the effect is as if weight alignment: a large number of opinions begin to be perceived as close in quality to the arguments. Secondly, multiple repetitions and duplications occur. Of course, the overall effectiveness of the discussions is greatly reduced. It seems that the situation can be improved by 1) division into precisely positioned units of content, 2) systematization of these units (or, perhaps, filtering is better to say). The only question is, due to what and within what service can this be done. My suggestion, as usual, is to model “objects + communications” [1] , [2]. In such an environment, the positioning of the content is not related to the positioning of the service - any unit of content (including a text object) represents the now popular spherical horse in a vacuum until 1) the type of object is defined (in this case, its positioning), 2) the context is not defined by the author through links to other objects. And trust types of filtering by people, stimulating them in some way (a separate topic). Now we can only outline a general principle - to stimulate more of those who out of the mass of opinions single out and retain arguments on the topic, and even more of those who issue a resume. Accordingly, to build a hierarchy of user attention - keep a resume in the top, then arguments on the topic, then opinions (listing is schematic and conditional).
Separation into formats may be useful in another respect. In another noteI slightly touched on the topic of scientific articles - in science there is a strict filtering by quality, it turns out to be a "high step" - articles either are published immediately at the current world level, or are not published at all. This stimulates the team game and, indeed, most of the articles (I think I don’t know the statistics) are co-written. For budding scientists, this is often the only way. Moreover, often there is a separation of roles: the idea from the more experienced, the execution from the beginner. As for the exact sciences, the idea is actually a thesis that needs to be checked in experiment, calculations, in calculations. And the thesis, we remember, is an author's thing. A real situation is when not all ideas are tested. Moreover, they are often forgotten and lost in a large amount of other information. And then someone makes a reinvention and embodies it in one form or another. The original authors pretty much lose on this in terms of public recognition (the fact of losing / forgetting potentially useful is also sad). But if the format of the thesis is positioned as a separate, significant, author's unit of content and this is fixed in the public mind, just as the format of a scientific article was once fixed, the situation will improve, I suppose. The Internet allows you to experiment with new forms, and we even have a trend towards small formats. Some kind of mass service like Twitter actually does this - it fixes a new communication format in the public mind. Moreover, there is a category of authors predisposed to give out many ideas, but not disposed to embody them. The same can be said about startups - a lot of ideas are expressed, but not all authors intend or can bring them to implementation. (By the way, perhaps it’s better to position it that way - “idea”. The thesis still does not always have the same meaning).
However, in real life, access to information expressed in the kitchen is much more limited than to information expressed in public places. And on the Internet, most of the materials are stored and equally accessible, regardless of the cultural context. And formally equally subject to legislation. Such a formal approach gives rise to a conflict with prevailing mass practice, from which Gleb Pavlovsky concludedabout the features of the Russian-language Internet, in which it is not customary to answer for “words”. There is nothing to be done with formal legislation, except for the very energy-consuming and inertial procedures for changing it. Given the speed of the web’s evolution, it can be quite (not) ridiculous - the laws will become obsolete by the time they are adopted. You can expand the public debate about this. For example, officially recognize the dependence of the responsibility of the authors on the declared positioning of the Internet resource. Or associate a measure of responsibility with the composition of the audience. Write, for example, at the entrance “attention, the site contains materials that can offend the religious (political) feelings of Muslims (Orthodox, WWII veterans, ...)”. And let the Muslims (Orthodox, veterans, ...) decide for themselves whether to go to such a site or not.
Accurate positioning of the services that host the author’s content helps to ease the severity of social and legal conflicts. But the positioning of the content goes beyond the outlined problems; this topic is more extensive and interesting. Positioning is contained in the very nature of human thinking, language, communication - we explicitly or implicitly give a certain status to what we say. A person’s speech usually contains at the same time a whole set of positions associated with different relationships: argument, thesis, consideration, opinion, evaluation, comment, question, resume (the list is probably not complete. In addition, mainly “logical” aspects are listed here, but you can add emotional: threat, regret, compliment, etc.) As a rule, these are small forms; some of them are close in meaning and convey only its different shades.
The most, in my opinion, interesting thing about positioning is that they can give different “weight” to the content. For example, in a broad public debate on an issue, there may be millions of opinions, comments on opinions, and opinions about comments. Of course, most of these opinions can be grouped into a small number of groups, where in each group there will be almost no differences between the opinions. But the positioning of opinion itself does not imply its obligatory argumentation and can only express the emotional attitude of the author without any justification. With the comments in general the same. Therefore, the weight of opinion is the lowest; it can only be increased by the authority of its carrier. Another thing is the argument. In any discussion there are not very many of them, most often there are only a few. The weight of the argument is high, but this form is too short and usually cannot exhaust the topic. I would say that the resume has the highest weight - it sums up all the available arguments or even the lack thereof. Still quite “weighty" positioning in the thesis. Although he, like opinion, does not necessarily imply justification, he also claims to claim some value. This is a fairly authorial format, because a claim for value is often associated with a claim for public recognition of the author.
Usually in discussions both in “real” and on various Internet sites all these positions are mixed, which is why, firstly, the effect is as if weight alignment: a large number of opinions begin to be perceived as close in quality to the arguments. Secondly, multiple repetitions and duplications occur. Of course, the overall effectiveness of the discussions is greatly reduced. It seems that the situation can be improved by 1) division into precisely positioned units of content, 2) systematization of these units (or, perhaps, filtering is better to say). The only question is, due to what and within what service can this be done. My suggestion, as usual, is to model “objects + communications” [1] , [2]. In such an environment, the positioning of the content is not related to the positioning of the service - any unit of content (including a text object) represents the now popular spherical horse in a vacuum until 1) the type of object is defined (in this case, its positioning), 2) the context is not defined by the author through links to other objects. And trust types of filtering by people, stimulating them in some way (a separate topic). Now we can only outline a general principle - to stimulate more of those who out of the mass of opinions single out and retain arguments on the topic, and even more of those who issue a resume. Accordingly, to build a hierarchy of user attention - keep a resume in the top, then arguments on the topic, then opinions (listing is schematic and conditional).
Separation into formats may be useful in another respect. In another noteI slightly touched on the topic of scientific articles - in science there is a strict filtering by quality, it turns out to be a "high step" - articles either are published immediately at the current world level, or are not published at all. This stimulates the team game and, indeed, most of the articles (I think I don’t know the statistics) are co-written. For budding scientists, this is often the only way. Moreover, often there is a separation of roles: the idea from the more experienced, the execution from the beginner. As for the exact sciences, the idea is actually a thesis that needs to be checked in experiment, calculations, in calculations. And the thesis, we remember, is an author's thing. A real situation is when not all ideas are tested. Moreover, they are often forgotten and lost in a large amount of other information. And then someone makes a reinvention and embodies it in one form or another. The original authors pretty much lose on this in terms of public recognition (the fact of losing / forgetting potentially useful is also sad). But if the format of the thesis is positioned as a separate, significant, author's unit of content and this is fixed in the public mind, just as the format of a scientific article was once fixed, the situation will improve, I suppose. The Internet allows you to experiment with new forms, and we even have a trend towards small formats. Some kind of mass service like Twitter actually does this - it fixes a new communication format in the public mind. Moreover, there is a category of authors predisposed to give out many ideas, but not disposed to embody them. The same can be said about startups - a lot of ideas are expressed, but not all authors intend or can bring them to implementation. (By the way, perhaps it’s better to position it that way - “idea”. The thesis still does not always have the same meaning).