When I was a girl I used to wait eagerly for my mum's seasonal catalogue. I spent hours scouring the pages, imagining what I would look like in the new outfits, choosing my toys for Christmas, looking at how much it would cost me over 12 weeks, 24 weeks for items I could never afford and comparing the details of the electric appliances. I would closely scrutinise the index finding related items, bags in the ladies section, bags in sport, bags in travel, I still read brochures, catalogues and magazine back to front, a legacy of those days.
My fascination with catalogues I think is analogous with my fascination with the digitally networked world we now live in, illustrated in my endless pursuit for connections with the information I find. A regular activity of mine is watching a film or TV programme with my tablet and laptop, surfing for details of the actors, information about their lives, the films they have been in, production details, box office stats and how many tomatoes received. Sounds familiar? It appears to me that we are living a semantic lifestyle, music services such as Spotify and Deezer, will create playlists based on your tracks and will suggest similar artists. Facebook and Twitter make recommendations of who or what to follow based on our online relationships, and web sites drop jars of cookies offering you products associated with the items we are browsing. Some may know the term semantic web was introduced by Tim Berners Lee and according to W3C "refers to the vision of the web of linked data". Although what I am describing may not be considered the semantic web in its purest sense I do think we are living a semantic existence, as increasingly the power of metadata and the integration of technologies facilitates our gold run of connections.
So this has led me to question if my semantic existence is enhancing my life or is it merely a momentary distraction. In one sense it has been a distraction when watching films and TV as I parallel surf, failing to give either one my full attention. On the other hand I think I have become more informed. One example is what happened last week. I watched the Punk Singer a Film about Kathleen Hanna although I would class myself as a feminist and was pretty active in the late 80s and 90s, I found that I was not very knowledgeable of the Riot Grrl punk movement, in particular the early work of Kathleen Hanna http://www.kathleenhanna.com/, although,I had picked up on Le Tigre about 5 years ago via Deezer when I was looking for artists similar to Stereolab. The range of sites and apps I now have to hand has uncovered a treasury for the Riot Grrl movement. I have been able to connect with similar artists via Deezer, find out tour dates for via Song Kick, find old gigs on YouTube and art works via Google images. I also found academic articles via Google scholar. For somebody like myself who is fascinated in feminism and culture these semantic tools have enabled me to create my own multimedia catalogue. My own semantic approach and distracted curiosity has led to a unexpected enhancement to my existing knowledge.
