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OTAKU_SCOPE


                                               May 10, 2012


   There are many places where                         "Oatku Japan's
   I think Azuma is about to say                       Database Animals" (2001)
   something I understand, and       p.104,105         by Hiroki Azuma
   then he veers off elsewhere.
                                                            OTAKU_BASE
   I thought he was about to say this:

     The collector experiences a
     drive to encompass a field,
     to own everything in the
     field.                                   The otaku sub-culture, at
                                              it's worst, is apparently
     But web is vast, and essentially         about this consumerist
     endless: you can follow link to          drive to encompass entire
     link to link for the rest of             product lines.
     your days without seeing it
     all-- without even seeing all of            For some kinds of collectors,
     any particular subset.                      it's not precisely about the
                                                 need to 'own': one might want
        To collecte every piece of               to read every book on a
        One-piece memorabillia would             subject in the local library;
        be a daunting, but acheivable            to hike every trail in
        task-- to read every web page            Yosemite; to quote everyone
        about One-piece?  Much                   on a list of approved
        harder... maybe not possible.            "post-modern" intellectuals,
                                                 etc.
        And actually, if you include
        things like fanfic as
        "memorabillia", that has
        similar problems of scope.        And Azuma's take (p. 105)
                                          is that this odd consumerist
                                          drive is a result of the
                                          postmodern condition: "For
                                          in the database-type world
                                          they confront, there is no
                                          grand narrative that can
                                          quell that passion."

                                              Most of us who visit
                                              Yosemite are content to hike
                                              the handful of trails that
                                              consensus has labeled the best.

                                              We have a cannon if not
                                              precisely a "grand narrative".

                                                            (Hike the
                                                            grand
                                                            cannon?).



  Now, think about Azuma's cultural
  models again: the modern tries to peer
  through a multiplicity of narratives
  to see the one grand design
  underneath; the postmodern otaku sees
  multiple characters and stories (often
  in side-by-side representations in
  different media), and underneath those
  is a myriad of familiar shared tropes.

  This notion of "layering" is clearly
  just metaphoric, however, the "deeper     To take the database
  layers" are abstractions of different     metaphor seriously:
  sorts-- really, generalizations about
  abstractions.                                 Actual databases are not
                                                restricted to a simple array
     If there's some difficulty                 of slots holding
     in penetrating these layers                undifferentiated blobs: a
     and visualizing it all at                  relational databse can have
     once...  might that not just               different sorts of schema,
     be a problem of scale?                     the records stored in a
                                                database can have all sorts
                                                of internal structure.

                                                If we're all using the same
                                                schema, if we're all using
                                                the same data set, that in
                                                itself is a great deal we
                                                hold in common... you might
                                                even say it approaches the
                                                level of a "grand
                                                narrative".

                         OTAKU_BENTO               To take the metaphor
                                                   less seriously:

                                                   There are multiple ways
                                                   the world can be sliced up
                                                   into different kinds of
                                                   identifiable patterns.











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