While reading David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, I definitely learned a few things that will make me think twice when shopping at Staples or perusing the pages of Wikipedia, but ultimately it has brought in to light the differences between physical and digital organization and order.
Our society is in the business of labeling and categorizing. It's what we do. We classify our CD collections, books in our libraries, and systems in science. Sorting is in the blood. Still, there hasn't been the perfect method for sorting and organizing our lives yet, and there never will be in the physical world. As Weinberger points out, "every time you organize matters in one way, you are disordering them in others" (88). We can only be in one place at one time, and the same goes for the stack of DVD's on the top of your entertainment center. Decisions have to be made on whether you'll organize your Disney collection alphabetically, chronologically, or in a way where your favorites are prominently displayed, and you can only choose one.
So how will we ultimately respond to making things miscellaneous on purpose for digital order to become possible? So far, it seems positive, even though it is making us rethink when and how we organize. Being able to tag and label digitally allows us to have anything and everything anywhere and everywhere. Knowledge is a web, not linear, so our organizational strategies should be too. If "how we organize our world reflects not only the world but also our interests, our passions, our needs, our dreams" (40), then let the way we use digital order to classify our world reflect our interests, passions, needs and dreams as varied, social, interconnected and global.
"Every tag, every link, every computer sweep through the online world enriches our potential for seeing connections and understanding things in context we had never considered" (124). The growing use of technology and digital order opens the door to endless possibilities.
Something I wonder that this book isn't addressing (maybe because it's obvious?) is how being predisposed to language has made us also predisposed to organize and catagorize our world. I'm thinking way back into the dawn of time to my intro to linguistics class stuff.
ReplyDeleteKim, it is interesting to consider how we, as people who have only known the first and second orders of order, will be able to fully explore this new, third order. Obviously computers can make connections that we can't see, but computers still rely on us to program them...
ReplyDeleteI really appreciate you bringing up this idea, because I was also interested in how the third order of order just seems to require more in an already crowded space. The whole idea behind being able to put items into multiple catagories is that there aren't any actual physical, "made up of atoms" things to put into these catagories. But still, more information seems to be needed in order to have that many connections.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I enjoyed Linnie's comment on this post as the human action of programming computers is a whole new aspect I hadn't really thought about in regards to this.