My take away idea from today’s symposium was the bit about how pages are ranked and credited. Although this is a topic thats been touched upon before, today’s symposium made things a bit clearer for me. Well that’s if I understood what was being said correctly.

From what I gathered, on the web everyone starts out with the same ranking; there is no hierarchy… yet. A site run by an academic will begin on the same level as a site run by your average student. These pages will probably experience some traffic, and other webpages may link to these sites. These other webpages, the ‘linkers’, will have been organised in  a hierarchical structure. A ‘.edu’ page will likely carry more authority than a ‘.com’ page, and so pages regularly linked by ‘.edu’ pages would be granted higher points and therefore seen as a more credible source, regardless of who the page is run by.

Adrian’s blog post ‘Unpicking One Tuesday‘ talked about the importance of relations ‘…that things are what they are not because they sort of lie there by themselves being what they are but they are always in these relations that really matter’. I kind of applied this to the online realm, where people come with their own histories, academic or not, and then the audience has the power to grant them importance. Tilly’s post also illustrated relations as being prime when understanding something. Hierarchies built on comparisons between sites, and quality of their audience, rather than the authors of those sites. Michaela’s post also discusses this, and when you take into consideration how the internet is a scale-free network, it makes sense to place more importance on quality of links and not quantity.