I guess this post is coming a bit late as our discussions of Wikipedia have come and gone (though our blog posts are getting increasingly random). But because I’m writing a paper for another class on encyclopedias (specifically Diderot’s Encyclopedia from the Enlightenment), I can’t help but compare the old encyclopedias of print to their Internet counterparts.
I read one article that states that the accumulation of knowledge will always be nothing but a “tragic ideal, embedded in historical time.” Basically knowledge (even if it’s true or even profound) continues to change as new thought comes to light. And the old knowledge, even if essentially unchanged, becomes part of something larger and would seem dated (or perhaps even incorrect) without being in the context of this new knowledge.

As I explored the social software links we were supposed to read, I first thought how funny it is to read definitions of other social software sites. Does anyone else feel uneasy when they read definitions of AIM, Urban Dictionary, or even (and this is the weirdest of all) Wikipedia's definition of Wikipedia? I'm not sure I can pinpoint what gives me this uneasy feeling. Maybe it's the concept of a site is defining itself (do print encyclopedias have entries on what encyclopedias are?). Or maybe my uneasiness springs from a point that Lulu raised at the beginning of her post and that made me laugh because it's so true: what isn't social software these days? Faceook, AIM, blogging...sometimes I feel like these are my life. Social software seems like second nature to me and, in that sense, undefinable and unable to be analyzed.