Martha Burtis at The Fish Wrapper via Ken Smith points to the Mojiti version of Michael Wesch’s two-week-old-already-famous video on Web 2.0. Mojiti was new to me. Like Martha, I find the Mojiti version very stirring. And I’m already scheming how to use this new site in my teaching.

But before I get to that, I need to say something about the spot sets at Mojiti. It’s extremely cool (I disagree with Ken that “cool” marks disengagement) to have the VH-1 popups all over the place. Those “popups” are what Mojiti calls “spot sets.” They’re the video equivalent of Flickr annotations on the image itself, but with the effect heightened because of the temporal dimension, and because the comment elements themselves can move. The comments truly become part of the video. But it’s even cooler that one can have both collective spot sets and individual spot sets. Ken discusses that dynamic here. Interestingly, the pull of individual authorship overtook Ken shortly after he posted, when he (I’m pretty certain it’s Ken) created his own spot set to illustrate his idea about online life and embodiment.

I have a lot of thoughts running through my mind about these spot sets. The concept is pretty simple. The complexity comes from the way the Mojiti creators have imagined the sharing. One can hide spot sets, for example, but still share the permalink (pointing not only to the video but to the video-plus-spot-set-commentary), which means that if one needed to restrict access to certain spot sets, one could–and that means that some teachers who are (understandably) reluctant to have all their classes’ work exposed to the whole world can nevertheless benefit from these tools. And for that matter, it’s great that spot sets have their own permalinks, allowing for precise location and citation.

Something about the flow of all this commentary fascinates me deeply. But there’s more. Something about the way these comments layer themselves into the original experience without erasing it (and after all, they can be turned off), and the way they can exist both collectively and individually, seems to me to reveal something hidden in plain sight. We write together because we are not each other, and because we are together. I don’t think any of this activity complicates our ideas of authorship. I think it does complicate some of the postmodernist assumptions about authorship by showing that the liminal states, and the way definitions get tricky near the borders, are not the only objects of interest. They may not even be the most interesting objects, given the energy and creativity released by both collective and individual commenting, especially when those distinctions are not only preserved but heightened in an environment that at every opportunity points to both as important and valuable.

CODA:

I’m very frustrated at this point, because I want to cite a passage from Amadeus. Unfortunately, two moves within six months have put many of my books in boxes, so a quick scan of the shelves in my temporary office has only confirmed my suspicion that I don’t have the play to hand. Because I live so much of my life online, “in the cloud,” I feel an irrational surge of annoyance that the text of Schaffer’s play is not available to me now, for immediate perusal and quotation, in an e-form I can get to right away. This is why I want a digital library. Not to replace the book, but to make these voices, these things I read and remember, instantly available for my orchestration and repurposing. But since Schaffer’s text is not available, this moment will pass, and a seed–for you, perhaps, or perhaps for me–will not be sown. To be surrounded by sense is the goal, and that surrounding must have its building materials ready to hand when the Muse reveals a blurred but compelling blueprint.

And what was the passage I wanted? The one in which Mozart talks about hearing voices sing together in opera, and how that uni-versity preserved each voice and each separate line, even as it enabled a synergy which no single voice could find on its own. If someone out there has the passage, I’d appreciate a bit of assistance. If not, I know: that’s what libraries are for. And thank goodness for them.