Social Semantics - Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web - page 193

that meaning is objective insofar as meaning creates objects. Representation returns
as a re -presentation of a referent, which is nothing more than the presence of a new
object being born. 7
We can finally rephrase our picture of the world and representation to take into
account this fundamental insight of social semantics. Instead of saying 'everything
is interconnected,' we would preserve the scientific prerogative that 'some things
are more or less connected than others' and it is the active reconfiguration of these
objects that leads to a dynamic ontology that is far removed from the classical
unchanging referents of our earlier picture. Instead of imagining everything shining
with meaning, imagine a picture where the various objects in our ontology encounter
each other, shining with greater or lesser intensity as they dynamically form new
assemblages; these in turn transforming into new objects before our very eyes.
There is no reason this process should be merely an immense ever-increasing
agglomeration, as it should also feature the dimming and even dissolution of objects.
The creation and destruction of these ontologies is social not in the sense of social as
a property of interactions between agents (although that is surely how it begins), but
social as seen as anything outside, over and above, the individual. The goal is not to
drown ourselves in the social totality, but to emphasize how ontologies pass through
the world . The social is not the inter-subjective individual sharing of information,
but the objective coming-into-being of an object via ever-decreasing latency over
time and space. This philosophical insight is at the present moment given form by a
practical universalizing engineering project: URIs on the Web.
While this picture seems strange enough, we should not fault Augustine for
missing it. The ultimate argument against sense-data is that we do not perceive
'greeness here now!' but instead we perceive a tree directly as a tree . We perceive
this precisely because our meaningful ontology inherited from both our social
interaction and the development of our bodies includes trees - but from another level
the trees can be seen as just a component in a larger object, that of the forest. Yet in
Augustine's time there was such an almost unchanging medieval world that featured
such a high latency between referents and their representations that he cannot be
faulted for missing the dynamic nature of ontology. As our social co-ordinations are
increasingly externalized and ever-increasingly constitutive of both ourselves and
our world in this era of the Web, the dynamic ontology of the world should be much
more obvious. In this way, we can escape the ontological framework we are born
into by embracing the cognitive scaffolding necessary to continually re-invent the
ontological lens through which we constitute ourselves and the world.
7 The fact that on the Web these new objects are digital means that what we may be seeing now is
the digitalization of the world, a notion that should be more widely explicated on its own.