Questioning Miscellany and Digital Disorder

The first six chapters of David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellanious deal, essentially, with the miscellany of digital information in the “new digital disorder” and the distinction between second-order and third-order information systems. The difference between the two, really, is that second-order information systems are limited by the physical space in which they’re constructed—think the Dewey decimal system, which despite its’ efficiency, suffers from the arbitrariness of its classification. Weinberger compares this to third-order classification systems, such as Amazon’s catalogues, that are rich with meta-data including customer reviews, sales information, lists, and etc. Weinberger contends that third-order classification systems lead to the formation of “smart leafs,” chunks of knowledge that are enriched socially, and that this allows people to realize associations between information that they may not have otherwise known existed.

I agreed with Weinberger’s ideas, for the most part, but his quoting of Borges in the fourth chapter brought up associations that made me question the scope of his thesis. Like Weinberger, Michel Foucault quotes Borges’s “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” in the Order of Things. In this work, Foucault argues that a “great table”—an episteme-- underlies knowledge and dictates our ways of knowing—the things that can be said and thought—in a particular historical era. I’m not sure if Weinberger’s allusion to Foucault was intentional or not, but it did set me off wondering… Does the emergence of the second generation web constitute a fundamentally new way of knowing, a change of our episteme? Or is the impact of web 2.0 relatively more modest, a limited shift in the ways we access and utilize data?

It seems like you could argue these questions in either direction, but I have a feeling that the second-generation web’s impact is a little more modest than its’ proponents suggest. Right now, I’m thinking about my phone. It’s a nifty little device. Among other things, I use it as a GPS Navigator, a flashlight, and a barcode scanner. But perhaps my favorite use for this phone, is I use it to stream Pandora radio whenever I need music. Pandora is a commercial radio service that grew out of the Music Genome Project; if I ask it to play Pink Floyd, it’ll return not only this group, but other groups that I might like. Pandora takes thousands of user-rankings and other meta-data in to account, and provides me a much richer musical experience than I could really get through ITunes. Like my phone, Pandora radio is nifty. It’s convenient. And like Weinberger, I am in love with the second generation web.

I nonetheless do think it’s important to recognize certain limitations in how the second generation web is used. Pandora radio does not challenge me—an appreciator of Pink Floyd, Buffalo Springfield, Phish, and other hippie music—to consider the relative merits of Pantera and Brittany Spears. Honestly, I’m glad Pandora doesn’t. But my rather dopey little example does point out an important limitation of web 2.0, and I do think it suggests that new means of classifying and sorting data will not necessarily change the parameters of taste that lead toward people’s using of that data. In my example, this limitation is relatively unimportant. But how many people use the rich interconnectivity of the web to find thousands of inter-related websites that all happen to reinforce their own point of view? To what extent has the web enabled the formation of new ideas, rather than the reinforcement of old ideas? What I’m suggesting, is that web 2.0 technology has great potential to change our ways of thinking—at the same time, it can also be used to deepen and reinforce our old ways of knowing. I think it’s important to wrestle with these problems in order to realistically assess the actual impact of Weinberger’s “new digital disorder.”