Weinberger Hits a Home Run

So I will admit that in chapters 1-6 I was not particularly impressed with David Weinberger's particular line of thinking. He seemed a bit enamored of the web, a little too giddy over its marvels, and, honestly, a little late to the party.

However (and that is a huge however), the chapter entitled, "Social Knowing" is where Weinberger really puts it all into perspective for me. He writes, "It's a pragmatic utopian community that begins with a minimum of structure, out of which emerge social structures as needed" (139). It's reminiscent of Lord of the Flies, but with grown-ups and electricity.

He also says,

"By announcing weakness without hesitation, Wikipedia simultaneously gives up on being an Oz-like authority and helps us better decide what to believe. A similar delaminating of authority and knowledge would have serious consequences for traditional sources of information because their economic value rests on us believing them. The more authoritative they are, the greater their perceived value" (141).

And this, really, is the true success of the Internet.To completely dismantle the idea that only those who are in the profession of publishing can make the decisions regarding information is the web's absolute crowning glory.

And this has long-reaching implications. We already see how Wikileaks is holding the government more accountable to their actions. The posting of government documents to a format that is publicly viewable is the first step in our citizens reasserting their democracy. There is a great parallel, I believe, between our passive acceptance of information through traditional channels (Encyclopedia Britannica) and our acceptance of what our elected officials do in Washington. They are those "experts who filter and weigh the evidence for us" (143). This seems to me like the beginning of a great awakening in America. Wikipedia may well be the first sign that our country is starting to realize "government for the people, by the people."  

Where does Sir Tim Berners-Lee live? I'd like to send that man some flowers.

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.

Miscellaneous Thoughts About Weinberger

As I am sitting here, the power goes off in the library. But I continue to work. Why? Because my internet connection is still live and the screen lights my fingers. I can’t see the book, true, but I can still explore what I want to write about. And I can still surf the net. That is a Faden, a string in German. A connection.


One of my favorite websites is Overheard in New York. It’s a place where New Yorkers go to post conversations that they overhear while in the city. It’s mostly shocking and outrageous, but also so funny in a wry, sad sense. And all I get is a little snippet. The good in me wants to believe that those people are really kind and loving and are rehearsing for a Broadway production or talking about something they overhead someone else say. But the site is one of those that you can’t help but look, and read. My husband doesn’t get it—he thinks the things posted on there are just sad commentary on the status of depraved human culture. But to me, it’s like looking in the medicine cabinet of some completely random stranger. These snippets of conversation (if accurately recorded, which is a whole nother Faden) are my way to see into some key, true aspect of their minds.  Here’s an example:

...So You Probably Shouldn't Insult Kuwait That Way.
Woman, gesturing angrily at new subway map: Did you see this? Look at this color! It looks like Kuwait! When I draw maps that's the color I use for desert wasteland!


Bystander: Well, it is Queens...

--1 Train; 
Overheard by: Rose Fox

To me, that’s the draw of the net. It’s nice that it’s being used commercially to make me buy books that I maybe didn’t want or need, and it’s also quite helpful if many Faden are able to connect the more important information that researchers and other bastions of society use to make their work more complete and productive. But it seems more valuable to me that I often make personal connections on the web with other like-minded people, which gives me a feeling of security and a sense of place. I am not alone in my randomly weird thoughts. I recently posted on my Facebook account for my friends to “sing” with me, one line per person, and I started the Faden:“I like mine with lettuce and tomato.” By noon, I had the song posted through the chorus by various friends. But, I was in a mood and I tossed it out there into the nexus of the internet. And before long, I was happy.

So what does this have to do with Weinberger? Well, honestly, the book is a few years old now, and many of the things that he’s talking about are no longer new concepts. But, commerce drives the advancement of many things, and it seems to be what is driving most of the miscellaneous development on the web. Google will now personalize your Google news page based on what you have been interested in the past. And if you don’t want a certain section, one quick click and it goes away.

Perhaps this all seems so un-new because we have finally made our computer experience sync more with the way our brains really work. For example, if I am driving down the street and I see a black Ford Ranger pickup, that makes me think of the car that my husband drove when he was in PA school. That leads me to think of PA school, which leads me to friends that we may not have heard from in a while, which makes me ask him how so-and-so is doing. And my husband may have seen the same black Ford Ranger and that truck led him down a similar path. If it did, then the question doesn’t seem misplaced in the context of our conversation. If he missed the pickup, he may ask me why I was thinking about that. I tell him, and relay the jumps that my mind made in getting to the question. So not only did the truck launch an inquiry into the status of one of our friends, it also potentially led to the disclosure of the metadata behind the question.

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.