Response to Weinberger 1-6

I recently experienced a spiritual crisis – I won’t go into the details because they’re rather boring, and who among us hasn’t had a spiritual crisis? During the crisis, I read Alan Watts’s The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity, and one of the suppositions of the book is that our world is one of duality, that we are defined by duality. The most obvious symbol of the duality of our existence is the yin and yang – we cannot know the light without separating it from the shadows, etc, etc. And I took that information in, felt it to be correct, felt comforted by the certainty of the statement even if I did not know my position in relation to that truth.
What I understand now, having begun Everything is Miscellaneous, is that one of the primal roots of our discomfort with technology and the digital world is that it upends this truth, something I am sure we all feel to some degree, because, as Weinberger points out, the digital is freed from this duality, this definition of what things are in relation to what they are not, because it is free from the physical, and we have, as a people, lived in the physical for millennia. We seek to arrange our world in relation to the physical, from our stores to our libraries, and when information, which isn’t physical, escapes from the bounds in which we place it, we become profoundly uneasy. (It should go without saying, but I know someone will say it so I’ll head off the comments here – I realize I am making sweeping generalizations here. I’m making imaginative leaps. Chalk it up to being a fiction writer if you want.)
What I have found most illuminating in Weinberger’s statements thus far is that what we take for granted as truths and the right and natural order of the world – truths like alphabetization is the best way to go when organizing lists and books, etc – are not actually set in stone, but are, in the scope of human existence, rather recent developments, or have recently been seriously debated and questioned. I found the Dewey chapter particularly interesting. It wasn’t until I started working in a library, and specifically started a project creating labels with pictures for the nonficiton section in the children’s department that I began to realize how strange the Dewey Decimal System is. My colleague Maria and I have sixty little hangy things that we will attach to shelves throughout the NF section, each with a label and a picture to help children and, increasingly, immigrants who are learning English, more easily navigate the section. But we came up against a number of challenges. First, what single picture should represent a section like mythology? Do we stick with Greek and Roman mythology, as it is a popular subset in the mythology section these days, or do we use a picture of Anubis or a totem pole? Books on the military are spread throughout the shelves – some, on the individual branches of service, live in the government section while others live in world history with books on D-Day. It doesn’t matter that I desperately want one section for each item and one picture to label those physical shelves. Information coyly refuses to submit.
I was quite taken with Weinberger’s chapter on lumps and splits, particularly with the image of a tree. It is unsurprising that many myth systems use a tree to represent the ultimate shape of the universe, like Norse myth and Yggdrasil:

I was also reminded of a This American Life program on mapping. Maps, though we see with this program that there are more than one way to map a neighborhood, just as the digital world gives us more than one way to organize information, are still bound by physical space and thus have the comfort of labels. Still, Watts cautioned in his book, “the map is not the territory.” The digital world is, I think, allowing us to see this more clearly.
Getting back to my crisis, I’m not sure it’s solved, but what I realized in those white nights is that what I wanted more than answers were labels. Tidy, comforting, convenient labels. I want to bind information about myself, information that defies easy bonds. For now, I’ve settled with calling my religion “mythopoetic.” It’s a label, sure, but a generously stretchy label, a smart leaf that has room to reorganize as I gather more information, because, as Weinberger says, “the solution to the overabundance of information is more information” (13).
On a side note, I noticed Cory Doctorow’s blurb on the back, and I want to plug Doctorow’s novel Little Brother. It is nominated for a 2011 Young Reader’s Choice Award, and is one of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read. It’s one of those books that I started one afternoon and then had to stay up until 2 AM to finish, so maybe read it on a break from school. But Doctorow’s novels deal with the collision of the digital and physical world and, in this particular novel, the technological unease found in the generation gap.