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'''Book: Everything is Miscellaneous. | '''Book: David Weinberger Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of The New Digital Disorder. Harvard University Press, 2007''' | ||
URL = http://worldcat.org/oclc/122291427 | URL = http://worldcat.org/oclc/122291427 | ||
“To get as good at browsing as we are at finding — and to take full advantage of the digital opportunity — we have to get rid of the idea that there’s a best way of organizing the world.” | |||
(http://www.radioopensource.org/weinbergers-miscellany/) | |||
=Description= | =Description= | ||
The following is an edited transcript of David Weinberger’s new book talk at Harvard. | |||
By Colin Rhinesmith at http://colinrhinesmith.com | |||
For the full audio version including Q&A please visit http://tinyurl.com/yulfzd | |||
The book is called Everything is Miscellaneous. The overall idea is we are a really well organized species. We like to organize things really neatly. But whether it's a kitchen or a library we almost always have stuff that doesn't fit. So we create a category called miscellaneous. And if it gets too big than your organization failed. What the book suggests is that as we digitize everything the miscellaneous category is going to eat the entire chart and that's a good thing. It's good for business, it's good for science, it's good for education, it's good for politics . . . In general that's a good thing, although it's quite counterintuitive. | |||
When one person gets to organize his or her way of thinking, one person, one way, it's incredibly limited. It seems like the very nature and purpose of reality is to keep things apart. We’ve been organizing stuff for thousands of years by obeying the two basic principles of reality. Which is you cannot have two things in the same spot at the same time no matter how hard you try. | |||
The second rule is that everything has to be in a place. In every domain, whether it's in the commercial realm, whether it's in education, if it's in science in how we organize species and or physical objects in a museum, everything has to go somewhere. So two basic principles are baked into reality and have some political consequences. It results instantly in authority coming forward because someone has to decide what’s going to make it on the front page and what the order will be. | |||
Generally we make good decisions about this but nevertheless it's a single group's decision (for example, an editorial board that's supposed to reflect our best interests). That's true whether it's anything physical. If it's a newspaper, if it's an encyclopedia that tries to fit all of our knowledge into 32 volumes and 65,000 topics as in the Britannica where some set of people decides what's important and how to organize it in a single way. | |||
Nature says that there is a single order. We have had this assumption for a long time and we still believe this with some depth and fervor. We do this because we want there to be order. We categorize. But it turns out that categorizing is just bringing things together that are alike, putting them next to each other whether physically or mentally. But we get to choose the things that make them alike. This works because the universe consists of things that tend to cluster. | |||
We like to know where things are in their relation to everything else. But this way of organization is limited by the physical. When we put away our clean laundry we make piles, we lump and we split. As a result if you map this, you end up with a tree. You start with a big lump of laundry but in the end, by making binary decisions, we are creating a tree. And the trees that we create (these guides) have been the pinnacle for how the world is ordered. And how we organize our ideas is constrained by the same ideas that we had by sorting our laundry. That's a constraint that we no longer need. | |||
Now we're digitizing everything and that changes everything. So it's useful to think about three orders of order: | |||
1. You organize the physical things themselves. You put them on shelves, put them in folders. And you come up with some order of doing things. The Dewey decimal system is, for example, one very good way to organize books. | |||
2. You separate the metadata about the things and you arrange it separately, which has tremendous advantages. By making a file card you greatly reduce the information so it fits on a 3x5 card. Because the cards are so small (which is a physical limitation) you can organize them in maybe 3 different ways (for example: author, subject, topic). This is much more convenient for finding things. | |||
3. Everything is digital and online. The content and the information about that content. And that changes the basic principles that we've had for organizing physical things for thousands and thousands of years. The assumption has been in the physical world that a leaf can only go on one branch. Online, if you have a digital store, you are going to put a camera into as many categories as possible so that people will find it. Amazon is a master of this. You can go to an Amazon page and just count the different ways that they've organized it. | |||
Physically you want a nice neat arrangement because otherwise you have entropy going on, wasted effort, you don't know where to find things. Online you want as much messiness as possible. That's because you can organize on top of the mess. You’re organizing the metadata. You don't have to actually touch the stuff itself. So if you have a web post that's got so many links that you can't even follow them. That's a huge success. It's enriched by all of this messiness. | |||
In the real world we're really used to thinking about the content and all the information about it. When it's online that difference disappears. When everything is online you can say, “I know the first line of a book, but I don't know who wrote it”. There is no difference between data and metadata anymore when everything is online. The only difference is that metadata is the thing you know and data is the thing that you don't know, but you're trying to find out. This is important because we use metadata as a lever to pry up what we don't know based upon what we do. And if everything is now a lever then we are way more smarter than we were before everything went online. We have so many more ways of finding what we don't know based upon the little that we do. | |||
It used to be that the people who owned the stuff also owned the organization of it. Now that's not true anymore. The people who own the stuff don't own the organization. We own the organization. Which means that now we are making up ways that we can sort through all this stuff and find it. | |||
So another way that we are trying to pull ourselves together once we lose the classification and organization, that is given to us by single individuals in authority, is by tagging (for example, del.icio.us). But because we are an insanely social species we'll also most likely notice that some of the people are finding really interesting stuff. So tags are intensely practical. They are being taken up by corporations to share the stuff that people are finding. But there is something more going on, as well. | |||
There is a lot of joy in tagging because, in part, it is a way of sticking it to the man. It's a way of saying, “We will classify. We are in charge of what's interesting”. So, doesn't this create chaos? | |||
Well, it turns out when you have enough tags (for example, Flickr) there is so much data there, just in the tag set itself, that they are able to cluster photos without knowing anything about the photos except the tags they are using. And it's remarkably precise. So when you have enough tags (despite what common sense would say) you don't necessarily end up with chaos. You may end up with actually more meaning and quite precise meaning. | |||
In the old way of classifying there was value in winnowing. In the digital world you want to include everything because we have alternative ways of sorting through it. The thing to you that looks like trash, in five years there's going to be a graduate student who will be studying it. So include everything. And instead of structuring everything ahead of time into neat categories postpone that moment until the user needs it. Because we'll sort through it based on our interest at the moment. Categorization always reflects interests. Our interests change. We can now have that dynamically presented. | |||
Give us the tools and we will sort through things the way we want. The more, the better. This is radically different than the job that our knowledge workers and editors have had for thousands of years. The people who create the almanac, they want to get as much as will fit in within a thousand pages. But their value is within keeping stuff out. | |||
3 types of implications for all of this: | |||
1. We are in a process of making the world more complex after having to keep it simple in order to organize it. We don't have to keep it simple anymore. And it's an enormous relief not to have to keep it simple anymore. Complexity makes us smarter. | |||
2. The world's greatest expert doesn't matter because he refuses to engage in a public negotiation of knowledge (for example, Wikipedia). Which is what happens when the authority vanishes and we are only left with each other and we engage with one another. This is how we get to the best truth we can manage. This is through the public negotiation of knowledge. | |||
3. Something really important is going on. Human beings seem to advance by externalizing functions of consciousness. What we're doing now maybe is externalizing meaning. (In a Heidegger sense) The connection of things enriches them and lets them have the context in which they are what they are. They are there for the next generations to make sense of to see if there are connections between two things that are tagged the same way. | |||
The semantic web is adding meaning to this collection of chaotic pieces that we have. Every link we make adds semantics, adds meaning to things in piles that we are able to mine and make sense of. And the amazing thing is, it's all ours. This is not done by someone else no matter how wise or smart they are. They can do this too. They can add into this and it becomes ours. It becomes our way of understanding the world. We've never had that ever before and now we do. | |||
Revision as of 14:10, 5 June 2007
Book: David Weinberger Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of The New Digital Disorder. Harvard University Press, 2007
URL = http://worldcat.org/oclc/122291427
“To get as good at browsing as we are at finding — and to take full advantage of the digital opportunity — we have to get rid of the idea that there’s a best way of organizing the world.” (http://www.radioopensource.org/weinbergers-miscellany/)
Description
The following is an edited transcript of David Weinberger’s new book talk at Harvard.
By Colin Rhinesmith at http://colinrhinesmith.com
For the full audio version including Q&A please visit http://tinyurl.com/yulfzd
The book is called Everything is Miscellaneous. The overall idea is we are a really well organized species. We like to organize things really neatly. But whether it's a kitchen or a library we almost always have stuff that doesn't fit. So we create a category called miscellaneous. And if it gets too big than your organization failed. What the book suggests is that as we digitize everything the miscellaneous category is going to eat the entire chart and that's a good thing. It's good for business, it's good for science, it's good for education, it's good for politics . . . In general that's a good thing, although it's quite counterintuitive.
When one person gets to organize his or her way of thinking, one person, one way, it's incredibly limited. It seems like the very nature and purpose of reality is to keep things apart. We’ve been organizing stuff for thousands of years by obeying the two basic principles of reality. Which is you cannot have two things in the same spot at the same time no matter how hard you try.
The second rule is that everything has to be in a place. In every domain, whether it's in the commercial realm, whether it's in education, if it's in science in how we organize species and or physical objects in a museum, everything has to go somewhere. So two basic principles are baked into reality and have some political consequences. It results instantly in authority coming forward because someone has to decide what’s going to make it on the front page and what the order will be.
Generally we make good decisions about this but nevertheless it's a single group's decision (for example, an editorial board that's supposed to reflect our best interests). That's true whether it's anything physical. If it's a newspaper, if it's an encyclopedia that tries to fit all of our knowledge into 32 volumes and 65,000 topics as in the Britannica where some set of people decides what's important and how to organize it in a single way.
Nature says that there is a single order. We have had this assumption for a long time and we still believe this with some depth and fervor. We do this because we want there to be order. We categorize. But it turns out that categorizing is just bringing things together that are alike, putting them next to each other whether physically or mentally. But we get to choose the things that make them alike. This works because the universe consists of things that tend to cluster.
We like to know where things are in their relation to everything else. But this way of organization is limited by the physical. When we put away our clean laundry we make piles, we lump and we split. As a result if you map this, you end up with a tree. You start with a big lump of laundry but in the end, by making binary decisions, we are creating a tree. And the trees that we create (these guides) have been the pinnacle for how the world is ordered. And how we organize our ideas is constrained by the same ideas that we had by sorting our laundry. That's a constraint that we no longer need.
Now we're digitizing everything and that changes everything. So it's useful to think about three orders of order:
1. You organize the physical things themselves. You put them on shelves, put them in folders. And you come up with some order of doing things. The Dewey decimal system is, for example, one very good way to organize books.
2. You separate the metadata about the things and you arrange it separately, which has tremendous advantages. By making a file card you greatly reduce the information so it fits on a 3x5 card. Because the cards are so small (which is a physical limitation) you can organize them in maybe 3 different ways (for example: author, subject, topic). This is much more convenient for finding things.
3. Everything is digital and online. The content and the information about that content. And that changes the basic principles that we've had for organizing physical things for thousands and thousands of years. The assumption has been in the physical world that a leaf can only go on one branch. Online, if you have a digital store, you are going to put a camera into as many categories as possible so that people will find it. Amazon is a master of this. You can go to an Amazon page and just count the different ways that they've organized it.
Physically you want a nice neat arrangement because otherwise you have entropy going on, wasted effort, you don't know where to find things. Online you want as much messiness as possible. That's because you can organize on top of the mess. You’re organizing the metadata. You don't have to actually touch the stuff itself. So if you have a web post that's got so many links that you can't even follow them. That's a huge success. It's enriched by all of this messiness.
In the real world we're really used to thinking about the content and all the information about it. When it's online that difference disappears. When everything is online you can say, “I know the first line of a book, but I don't know who wrote it”. There is no difference between data and metadata anymore when everything is online. The only difference is that metadata is the thing you know and data is the thing that you don't know, but you're trying to find out. This is important because we use metadata as a lever to pry up what we don't know based upon what we do. And if everything is now a lever then we are way more smarter than we were before everything went online. We have so many more ways of finding what we don't know based upon the little that we do.
It used to be that the people who owned the stuff also owned the organization of it. Now that's not true anymore. The people who own the stuff don't own the organization. We own the organization. Which means that now we are making up ways that we can sort through all this stuff and find it.
So another way that we are trying to pull ourselves together once we lose the classification and organization, that is given to us by single individuals in authority, is by tagging (for example, del.icio.us). But because we are an insanely social species we'll also most likely notice that some of the people are finding really interesting stuff. So tags are intensely practical. They are being taken up by corporations to share the stuff that people are finding. But there is something more going on, as well.
There is a lot of joy in tagging because, in part, it is a way of sticking it to the man. It's a way of saying, “We will classify. We are in charge of what's interesting”. So, doesn't this create chaos?
Well, it turns out when you have enough tags (for example, Flickr) there is so much data there, just in the tag set itself, that they are able to cluster photos without knowing anything about the photos except the tags they are using. And it's remarkably precise. So when you have enough tags (despite what common sense would say) you don't necessarily end up with chaos. You may end up with actually more meaning and quite precise meaning.
In the old way of classifying there was value in winnowing. In the digital world you want to include everything because we have alternative ways of sorting through it. The thing to you that looks like trash, in five years there's going to be a graduate student who will be studying it. So include everything. And instead of structuring everything ahead of time into neat categories postpone that moment until the user needs it. Because we'll sort through it based on our interest at the moment. Categorization always reflects interests. Our interests change. We can now have that dynamically presented.
Give us the tools and we will sort through things the way we want. The more, the better. This is radically different than the job that our knowledge workers and editors have had for thousands of years. The people who create the almanac, they want to get as much as will fit in within a thousand pages. But their value is within keeping stuff out.
3 types of implications for all of this:
1. We are in a process of making the world more complex after having to keep it simple in order to organize it. We don't have to keep it simple anymore. And it's an enormous relief not to have to keep it simple anymore. Complexity makes us smarter.
2. The world's greatest expert doesn't matter because he refuses to engage in a public negotiation of knowledge (for example, Wikipedia). Which is what happens when the authority vanishes and we are only left with each other and we engage with one another. This is how we get to the best truth we can manage. This is through the public negotiation of knowledge.
3. Something really important is going on. Human beings seem to advance by externalizing functions of consciousness. What we're doing now maybe is externalizing meaning. (In a Heidegger sense) The connection of things enriches them and lets them have the context in which they are what they are. They are there for the next generations to make sense of to see if there are connections between two things that are tagged the same way.
The semantic web is adding meaning to this collection of chaotic pieces that we have. Every link we make adds semantics, adds meaning to things in piles that we are able to mine and make sense of. And the amazing thing is, it's all ours. This is not done by someone else no matter how wise or smart they are. They can do this too. They can add into this and it becomes ours. It becomes our way of understanding the world. We've never had that ever before and now we do.
Reviews
- Cory Doctorow (BoingBoing) at http://www.boingboing.net/2007/05/02/everything_is_miscel.html
- Karen Schneider at http://www.techsource.ala.org/blog/2007/05/weinbergers-well-ordered-miscellany.html
- Ethan Zuckerman at http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/?p=1413
- Peter Morville at http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000167.php
More Information
Podcast at http://www.radioopensource.org/weinbergers-miscellany/