Social Semantics - Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web - page 192

and content (referent), but a reconciliation of this dichotomy; this is accomplished
via the content (sense) being the objective and so governing the behavior of agents
on a social level. So at long last meaning can be defined as the causal effect of
information as demonstrated by the collective social behavior of agents .
There are also deeper ramifications not only on the agents, but the world. One
of the central problems of both the descriptivist and causal theory of reference is
that representation is imagined as attached to referents in an external, pre-given
static world. The problem may not be representations per se, but the particular static
ontology of the world of the classical theories of meaning, and so the mathematical
models of the world in classical logic. Let's return to our representational cycle as
given in Chap. 2, in which representations are held to be representations by virtue of
a historical, causal chain spread out over time and space with their referents. There is
a latent contradiction in the Web which we do not solve: namely, as representations
are defined by separation over time and space, the inexorable trajectory of the
Web is bent on eliminating this very division of time and space. The cycles of
representation become ever more infinitesimal as the Web interconnects referents
ever closer with their representational nexus. At a certain point, the operative
question becomes whether or not the representational nexus simply becomes a new
kind of first-class object? 6 In other words, the ontology of the world is dynamic,
created as an enactment between a multiplicity of objects and representations that
alter each of them in turn. A representation of an object is the spreading out of
an object in time and space. It is not to say that the representational cycle and its
vocabulary of referents disappear, but that they are mediated by objective sense and
that the formation of a representation is just the first step of the unfolding of a new
kind of object. In such a dialectic, the map becomes the territory.
Take the practical example of an ubiquitous Semantic Web; while today when
we encounter commodities such as tomatoes on sale at the super-market we are
unaware of their social history (they appear on the shelves as if by magic!), imagine
a world where the Web made all that information public and immediately accessible.
So when one saw a tomato, one would be informed of where it was picked and
by whom, by what manner it arrived, the costs of this operation. Imagine this
information being immediately available when one encountered the tomato, and
imagine also that various information about yourself (such as your allergies, your
previous meals, even aesthetic preferences) were available as well, and could even
interact with the information about the tomato in real-time. Would not the entire
nature of the tomato and your interaction with the world be altered, so that it would
be correct to call the tomato and its extended nexus of representations a new kind of
object? In this manner, we do not mean 'objective' to be defined in terms of a vision
of the world from some God's eye vantage point independent of any subject, but
6 This is distinctly opposed to the viewpoint of certain post-structuralist or postmodern theorists like
Baudrillard who hold that representations are 'copies' that are just as real or true as their original
referent (Baudrillard 1994). Instead, we challenge this belief in a singularly real or authentic (and
so static) ontology by incorporating the referent and representation into a new ontological object.