The Digital Organization of Atoms?

While I don’t think that David Weinberger brought up any ideas that were overly profound, I do think that people tend not to give much thought to the ideas he addressed. In his book, Everything is Miscellaneous, Weinberger states that the direction society is going with organizing information is digital: “Content is digitalized into bits, and the information about that content consists of bits as well. This is the third order of order and it’s hitting us… like a ton of bricks” (19). People type on computers, then save what they have typed in a digital form. They also upload their digital photos to their personal computers and then share them on sites like Facebook where anyone with the right amount of security access can view them. People don’t focus on how to organize digitally because that is the job of a computer programmer while focusing on your personal stack of CDs or organizing a photo album in your bookshelf is the work on “everyman.”
Digital organization works just fine for things like photos on one’s computer or essays for a school course, but there will never be an end to the physical parts of the world, and the digital order does not translate to matter. While Staples has a website devoted to making shopping easier for its customers by using the third order of order to put items in multiple categories, there is a warehouse that the items being purchased are stored in, and this warehouse undoubtedly uses the first order of order to be able to get these items from where they are stored and put them in a box to ship to the customer.
Because we are humans made up of atoms and our possessions are also made up of atoms, there will always be a need for the first and second orders of order. I appreciate that there is a way to organize information digitally that makes it more browsable and it can be stored, and therefore found, more easily, but until this way of organizing can also be applied to physical matter, I don’t believe that the act of pointing out the flaws in our current organizational methods is overly helpful. While the third order of order is obviously only valuable toward information and things that can be digitalized, the first and second orders of order are still necessary and if the methods of organizing them are outdated, perhaps a new method is the next big innovation that should come around. No matter how digital the world gets, there will always be the physical to accompany it.