While getting through Everything is Miscellaneous seemed to be a bit of a slog, David Weinberger’s lengthy history of categorization, cataloging, organizing, and classifying began to sink in to my boggled brain about half way through its 233 pages (not including the notes pages, which are lengthy!). What seemed like way too much philosophy at first, gave me a near-epiphany about the future of knowledge and information organization. More importantly, it provided for me an understanding and vision of the future of control of what I’ll call “content.” When I use the term “content” I refer not just to the Internet but newspapers, magazines, books, television, radio and any media that is viewed by the general public either for free or by subscription.
After getting through the first, second and third orders of order (physical location of an object being the first; a card catalog designed to locate items organized by category being the second; and the order of disorder or miscellany being the third), I initially found Weinberger’s concept rather unsettling. We tend, as humans, to usually embrace order and organization. I myself am a chronic list-maker, labeler, and filer – I’m a secretary for gosh sakes! My job is keeping things (including my boss) organized and making sure that I can put my hands on things when I (or my boss) need them.
So I settled down a bit once I remembered that in addition to my alphabetical file cabinet index, I also use digitization and powerful search engines to find things. Then came my near-epiphany, which gave me both fear and optimism for the future at the same time. Weinberger describes the new form of knowledge in the age of electronic socialization and communication as a utopian democracy of data-flow: “..we’ve been told that knowing is our species’ destiny…Now we can see for ourselves that knowledge isn’t in our heads: it is between us. It emerges from public and social thought and it stays there, because social knowing, like the global conversations that give rise to it, is never finished.”
Weinberger makes it sound like all voices have value – and in the “utopian democracy of knowledge” that would be the ideal. But we don’t live in that sort of place and the Internet certainly isn’t that place either. I’m not saying that all information has to be controlled but we need to know how to separate the wheat from the chafe, the good from the bad, and the true from the false.
While I welcome the idea of the public steering content in the media, I fear for the amount of faulty, false, unreliable, and unfiltered information that will taken as fact. And to an extent this happens already. As humans we all have ideas, leanings, beliefs, and opinions – in other words we all have agendas. Take for example, the “Birthers” who firmly believe that President Barak Obama was born in Kenya. Aside from the fact that his birth certificate has been verified and certified by the state of Hawaii and published for everyone on the World Wide Web to see, there is still a group of people who state that the document is false or counterfeit and want Obama removed from office. While I, and hopefully, everyone reading my post knows that this is poppy-cock, I happen to have a best friend whose mother is very naïve and believes everything that people tell her. A couple of weeks ago, she forwarded me an email with “BREAKING NEWS” in the subject line. What followed was the “news” item about Obama being born in Kenya. I love this lady dearly and have known her all my life, but this proves my point. She received the email from a guy she met online in a chat room. Is this how we’ll spread the wealth of knowledge in the future?
But there are also positives in the third order of order and the digital flow of knowledge. Different opinions are exchanged and debated, and the way in which information, ideas, and knowledge flow out loud has exposed all of us to more knowledge. In Weinberger’s closing page he states: “It’s not who is right and who is wrong. It’s how different points of view are negotiated, given context, and embodied with passion and interest. Individuals are thinking out loud and now have weight, and authority and expertise are losing some of their gravity.”
So is more information better information? I like to think that more knowledge is better knowledge and perhaps that is where my optimism comes in. While reading the book I jotted down a few information networking sites – I now have about 25 articles saved in my Delicious.com account that I hope expand my knowledge on my research topic. If I hadn’t read the book, I never would have found all of the miscellaneous information that seems to be feeding very well into my idea thread for my research paper.
PS: After reading the book, I looked up read book reviews, of which, opinions varied widely - from pompous to brilliant. Links are included below. I also was able to catch Weinberger's lecture on the book that could be very beneficial to my auditory and visual learning class-mates. It can be viewed at:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2159021324062223592#
Book Reviews:
http://boingboing.net/2007/05/02/everything-is-miscel.html
http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000167.php
http://quarterlyconversation.com/everything-is-miscellaneous-by-david-weinberger-review
http://informationr.net/ir/reviews/revs269.html
http://metamemes.typepad.com/beyond_brainstorming/2007/06/everything_is_m.html
http://www.britannica.com/bps/additionalcontent/18/27439279/Everything-is-miscellaneous-the-power-of-the-new-digital-disorder/fulltext
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