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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 achievable 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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