According to Weinberger, his three orders of information strip the control of assets from the traditional authorities.

I must admit, I never thought about the difficulties associated with establishing an alphabetical system of organization.

The new digital order of every idea is browsable, that organization of information must accommodate each persons particular needs and way of thinking.

Weinberger recognizes our robust need for order in all things. He points out that while our need for order is dynamic, or organizational methods should help to tell us determine something about the very things being organized. In comparison the example of the planets versus the periodic table.

Weinberger refers to the Greeks belief that the World must have joints, and for us to be able to have knowledge we must be able to identify those joints and that knowledge occurs when the joints of our ideas is the same as the joints of nature.

I think need some additional clarification as to the actual definition of the “Joints.” Is the joint representative of and “intersection” between the ideas of man or thought and our environment.

Does Weinberger conclude in his summary that the digital world of miscellaneous or the third order should not be hierarchial. That no one categorical element take presednce over any other in “the Index” in “the Book” within the Book. (Sorry, I slipped back into Derrida there for a moment.)

Everything Is Miscellaneous was a real eye-opener for me, to recognize the value of databases and how tags work to create order of the seemingly un-orderable.

The third order of order is, in Weinberger’s estimation, the smart way to create order of the miscellaneous, of the chaos that frequently surrounds us. Beyond the archive, we can create metadata for just about anything. The number of things to tag is unlimited, but metadata itself has limits, in that data about data must not exceed the size of the original data! We’re tagging everything, and in some cases, others tag it as well. To some extent, our subjective tagging may only make sense to us. In a case such as this, the metadata could be worthless to others.

My other observation would be the element of surprise. Like Weinberger, I frequent a place similar to Brookline News & Gift. And to some extent, I prefer it the way that it is, without metadata or even the second order of order. To wander through the shop is to explore things that even the owner knows little about. In our techno-utopian world of order, I frankly find some disorder to be a little comforting.

Sure, the tags helped find a blog, but any search engine worth its salt could find a blog about rabbits without a tag. But, could it find the one about VW rabbits without pulling in everything else in the animal kingdom? Not unless you type in VW Rabbit. OK. So that’s not all that hard. But it’s nice to be able to see exactly what you are looking for even if you entered the wrong information just by grabbing the “auto” or “car” tag.

I had not made the connection between the Dewy Decimal system and metadata until Weinberger pointed it out, but now I’m amazed that Dewy was so forward thinking. Granted, he wasn’t forward thinking enough to include room for all religions, but the ability to expand is incredible. And that’s what tagging is – infinite expandability. No matter what else an automobile becomes, as long as we still call it automobile, everything with that tag will show up in a “delicious” scan.

Yes, this post is the most “like, OMG, I’m totally loving it”-esque of the bunch, but without finding a single fact to underline or note, “Everything is Miscellaneous” has shown me an entirely new way of looking at, well, the world. It validated my scattered way of thinking and moved my instant response from “where should I file that” to “how many tags should that get.”

I would agree that digital miscellany allows more people access to things they may not have previously known to find, but would have to disagree with Weinberger’s optimism that people will that the opportunity. Just because someone can find one of the unfinished thoughts that spark conversation on the Web doesn’t mean they will. Many people still go to sites that are familiar and spend time singing with the choir, so to speak. Or, if they venture out of their safe zones, they’ll often go just for fuel to feed their side’s fire. But the organization, or the perfect lack thereof, is available to all who wish to use it. Removing or loosening the organization has got to be one of the most important informational and structural revolutions to date.

Weinberger writes that “Reading will cease being a one-way activity. It will become as social as the knowledge our children are developing as they instant-message one another about homework” (222). Clearly, his conception of “knowledge” is untraditional. Passages like the following force me to question the implications of his argument in the context of the university as a viable institution: “Experts can be helpful, but in the age of the miscellaneous they and their institutions are no longer in charge of our ideas” (102). This notion is provocative and seems revolutionary to me.

Along these lines, metadata has challenged the belief that “truth means accuracy… and knowledge is power” (229). When information wants to be miscellaneous, as opposed to categorized and indexed (7), power is the ability to find information and make meaning from it. “In the world after the Enlightenment, the cultural task was to build knowledge. In the miscellaneous world, the task is to build meaning” (222). Weinberger argues convincingly against knowledge (or truth, I suppose) as the ultimate goal or achievement. In fact, in some cases, knowledge can be the beginning. The motto of SurveyMonkey.com is “knowledge is everything,” but of course the knowledge gained from surveys is useless without interpretation for meaning. “Making sense of what we know is the broader task, a task for understanding within the infrastructure of meaning” (222). As Weinberger observes, knowledge is no longer power

Knowledge can be gained from interaction with a single, credible source (Encyclopedia Britannica or a published article), but understanding can be gained best through a network of information sources (Wikipedia, blogs, or conferences). As Weinberger writes, one does not engage in conversation with others to gain knowledge, but rather an understanding of what is NOT known (203). In fact, the unknown is what should be important to a conversation (203). The network makes ample allowance for conversation, although I wonder if everyone who participates is responsible enough to offer something of value, something from which we can make meaning or gain understating. Surely, we can learn something from ignorance, bigotry, gratuitous displays of violence or sex, for example, but there must be a point when irresponsible network users wear on us and shape our very ability to make meaning.

In considering the opposition of metadata vs. data, I wonder if Weinberger has set up a category just like the categories he protests. As we talked about in class a few weeks ago, binaries only make sense because of their opposite, and this is true here. We can only know what metadata is because its opposite (data) is there. “Going meta” (227) might mean that endless metadata could become indistinguishable from data. Or, perhaps any distinction would become irrelevant.

Weinberger also talks in extend about wikipedia. People talking about a subject until they agree upon it is arguably better than an elite deciding on it; truth = accuracy.. This sharing of point of views, he says, is the key to arriving at a neutral point of view on a subject as ‘knowledge is between us’, not in our heads, but rather a subcategory of communication. Knowledge can only exist in a network.

This book yelled Derrida’s statement ‘sediment looks separate, but it is actually impossible to differentiate one layer from another when looking closely.’ Lines of division are always arbitrary to some degree. The digital world is focusing on relationships between subjects instead of the division between them.

An important point he makes is that the fragmentation of interest existed before the Internet; people of different class and race disagreed completely on their top ten television shows. The Internet offers a two-way structure of communication, offering a system where conversation, disagreement, and collaboration can take place – this works against polarization. Conversation thrives on difference.

Weinberger draws the distinction between knowledge and understanding, saying the weakness of the former is the strength of the latter. He says knowledge is becoming a commodity, which means that a company hoarding its information diminishes its power in the market.