Are You (Meta)Experienced?

Even non-geeks like me are increasingly aware of and involved with our personal metadata.  The personal metadata I interact with most frequently is the information I share with Last.fm derived from the music I play on this laptop.  For the unitiated, anytime I play a song on iTunes (or stream a song from Last on their player), the song title, artist, and album information is uploaded to my Last profile.  The system also notes when a particular song was played and how often I play it.  All of this metadata is compiled by Last, and most of it is made available in a series of charts on their site, as well as via the Audioscrobbler Web Services API (for examples of the latter, here are my Top 50 Artists in plain text and XML.  Put that in your aggregator and smoke it.)

I'm focusing on Last because it's such a great example of what happens when user-friendly systems make it easy for us to record, store and analyze our metadata: We have meta-experiences.

Just as metadata is "data about data," a meta-experience is "an experience about an experience."  When I look at my Last charts, I'm having a meta-experience; the experience of comprehending and assessing that information is derived from a previous (or concurrent) experience--in this case, listening to a song.

And as systems like Last proliferate (and they will), and we're able to capture more and more of our personal metadata, our meta-experiences will become more explicit and meaningful to us.  We'll be more conscious of the presence (or absence) of the meta-experience at the moment of experience.

I notice this now when I'm playing music on a device other than this laptop--an iPod or my car stereo, if I'm out of the house, or the CD player hooked up to my stereo if the laptop's off and I don't feel like booting it up.  I'm oddly conscious of the fact that the music  isn't going anywhere but in my ear.  The metadata's simply disappearing, and I'm being deprived of a potential meta-experience.

Why do I care?  What impulses make my Last meta-experience (and potentially other meta-experiences) meaningful?  Meta-experiences document our experiences, and allow us to, well, experience them in entirely different ways.  They essentially add a whole new dimension to whatever we're doing.  For example, by sharing my musical metadata with Last, I have a much better understanding of which artists I listen to and when, and how those preferences can evolve over time.  I can exchange my metadata with other people through explicit and implicit gestures, both by inviting them (my "Friends"), as well as by letting Last match me with people whose tastes are similar to mine (my "Neighbors").

I could go on, but my point is simply this: Now that we've begun to capture and make use of our personal metadata, we're going to become increasingly conscious of the resulting meta-experiences.  And we're going to want more.  (Of course, all this has huge implications for the field of attention.)  More to come, I'm sure.

UPDATE: Putting theory into practice, here's a little graph of the number of songs I've played by the top 300 artists in my Last profile as of today.  (Look familiar?)  Congratulations--you are now  meta-experienced.

tags: attention attentiontrust last.fm metadata metaexperience meta-experience

Comments

[Stewart]

What do you, (if anything), think we may learn about you from your choice of music? :)

[Ed]

Uh, I'm old? ;-)

[Stewart]

Well yeah :) Black Sabbath was unexpected, and Cannonball Adderley was new to me so I downloaded a couple of albums from Napster, it's pretty cool :)

[Ed]

I'm not really a Sab fan--I just love "Heaven and Hell," and listened to it over and over one night a few months ago--I think that's the only song I have by them.

Adderley's a pretty recent interest. His early stuff is a little light for me, but it didn't take him long to evolve, and I really like his later stuff. He also has a good album with Nancy Wilson on vocals--not every cut hits home, but it's a nice pairing.