A Messy Post

I appreciated the last few chapters of this book. I felt, surprise, that the conclusion concluded his ideas better than his introduction did (I don't know what I expected last week...I guess I just felt in limbo, waiting to see how it all worked out). I thought of several ways I could organize this post, but I've decided to be very messy--in honor of Mr. Weinberger's 9th chapter. I would change this post's format to make it really messy, but you get the idea.

Quotes and comments:

• “Knowledge—its content and its organization—is becoming a social act” (133).

I think content is becoming more social than organization in certain circumstances like Wikipedia, but less so in other areas like the Dewey Decimal system. I guess people could tag articles on Wikipedia, and in that way make them more organized (see the next quote), but there needs to be a relatively small set of experts that program and organize the web site.

• “The more metadata, the messier and richer the potential” (176).

I love that he links messiness with potential. The section I was most drawn to was chapter 9: “Messiness as a Virtue.” Excellent, I thought, I’m going to feel better about my disorganized tendencies after reading this section. I could have guessed, though, that he was referring to digital messiness and that different rules apply. The word “messy” is a little misleading. I might imagine the more posts/tags/etc, the more visually cluttered the page becomes. In a way, though, the data is very well organized—there’s a hard drive somewhere that has the information nicely tucked away. I would argue that it isn’t messier when it’s in the third order of order.

• “Deciding what to believe is now our burden. It always was, but in the paper-order world where publishing was so expensive that we needed people to be filterers, it was easier to think our passivity was an inevitable part of learning; we thought knowledge just worked that way” (143).

This book is part of that initiative—to help people understand the way knowledge works. Passivity is a natural reaction when presented with new information. For a time, think of the Burkean parlor analogy, we stop, think, and listen before acting. The proliferation of information and online publishing has forced people into the spotlight, unable to sit back passively.

• “As we pull the leaves from the trees and make a pile of the miscellaneous, we free the leaves from their implicit context” (165).

I appreciate that he acknowledges the possible dangers of the third order. Potentially, though, the third order could provide more contextual information than any other form of organization. For example, I read a story about a prototype recording system that records everything you see and hear. If this were practical, this could provide a more reliable contextual evidence than memory, tags, etc. could.

Richard Samuelson