Now that the Web has made everything miscellaneous, as David Weinberger argues in his new book, we're free to remix the world.
By Scott Rosenberg <http://www.salon.com/books/int/2007/05/23/weinberger/index.html? source=rss> May. 23, 2007 | The rise of the Web has dethroned authorities, atomized our culture and set us loose in the resulting sea of fragments. This familiar sky-is-falling argument regularly inspires an anguished plea: We must restore order in the messy digital realm! Won't someone organize this endless churning chaos? Can't we clean up the Web? David Weinberger says, nah. For one thing, such an effort would be futile. More important, it misses a great opportunity technology has opened before us -- a chance to transform how we think about, well, everything. Weinberger's new book, "Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder," lays out the upside of digital technology's impact on our ways of knowing. The book builds on ideas in Weinberger's previous works -- "Small Pieces Loosely Joined" and "The Cluetrain Manifesto" (which he co-authored) -- to present a key insight into the nature of the Web world. The argument goes like this: As long as knowledge was organized physically, on paper, in books and card catalogs and such, we remained stuck in the belief that there is "one right way" to define, organize and think about any subject. Now we've moved information into the infinitely mutable realm of digital data -- where anything can point to anything else, space keeps expanding faster than we can fill it, and we can reshuffle and re-sort at a keystroke. In this world, the same thing can "be" in more than one place -- it can, in fact, be in as many places as we want. That means we have a chance to think more nimbly and flexibly -- to reorganize knowledge from multiple perspectives to suit our changing needs. We're not losing context; we're gaining contexts. "Everything Is Miscellaneous" offers a hopeful, pragmatic vision of how the benefits of moving from paper to bits will outweigh the costs. It's also an approachable work of popular philosophy in business-book drag. It covers timely topics like Wikipedia and tagging and folksonomies; it also offers diverting takes on the Dewey Decimal System, Linnaeus' species classification, the periodic table of the elements, and the controversy over Pluto's membership in the club of planets. I recently talked with Weinberger at Salon's San Francisco office. "Everything Is Miscellaneous" talks about three different "orders of orders." It's very orderly, in that way. But by the time I reached the end I'd forgotten what the first two orders were. The first order is the organization of the things themselves: the books on the bookshelves, the radishes in the ground -- physical things arranged physically. It doesn't get much more basic and primitive than that. Second order is the information about those things, the metadata -- physically separated from it, and also organized physically. Typically, that data is a great reduction of the information in the first order: catalog cards that take a book full of ideas and complexity and boil it down to what fits on a 3- by-5 card. We do that because of physical limitations. What you actually want is not just all of the information that's in the book, but more than that, you want all the information about the book. You want to know everybody who talked about it. You can't do that in the second order -- the card catalog would be bigger than the library. We've grown to accept that we need to reduce the amount of information in order to make things findable. Is that because we're locked into the assumption that the physical order is the only order? Yes, and it has been the best way of doing it. You have to make very good decisions about which information to capture, and we've gotten good at those decisions. In the third order, the contents and the metadata are digital. Because the digital space is unbounded, it's indefinite, it's so cheap to add stuff, we can actually get what we wanted in the second order, but we didn't know we wanted -- which is to have a superset of information on the first order as a way of finding it. One of the frequent reactions to "Everything Is Miscellaneous" is what you might call "the second-order people strike back" -- the argument that we need experts and authorities and the order they impose on chaos. People say, we really still need the expertise and the second-order systems transposed into the digital realm -- these are very well thought through taxonomies and taxonomic trees that you can browse through, and they have advantages that you don't get in messy, Webby systems. And unfortunately for the purposes of controversy, I agree with that! You want to have everything. There are places where you need the precision of a taxonomic tree -- you need defined terms, you need very carefully constructed metadata that is a reduction of the full set of information in order to find things. We want that. We just want everything else, too. [snip] ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
