My friend Rob van Kranenburg just let me know about a new Weinberger book.
This is what he sent me to point our some of Weinberger's comments on how we chart information and structure knowledge:
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.
Plus:
>> 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.
From my point of view there are quite a few things out there, which make
the whole "meta tagging and databasing and del.i.c.i.o.u.s-ing everything
brings us closer to the truth" a bit doubtful.
Connections to other people is important as this is the only
'thing' we can justifiably compare ourselves to and the only thing that
defines us might not even be that, but the actions that evolve out of this,
so is it even the connections that matter?
If we keep objects or spaces with memory, then its the memory of our
relations to other people (or teh absence of it) that makes the meaning.
Ergo: those objects are and can only be alient to us or so simplistic that
it will always escape the individual dataset or connection.
Which basically means that history failed, and looking at the destructive
and simplistic nature of history's record, i might actually be up to
something.
Now for Weinberger's view, though i like his theories, just arguing that we
actually are clever and can finally bring order to the universe , if we
just ALL start putting things in order together or embrace a complexity
model for that matter, is again just
contemporary urban myth. We can't. Life is too much in flux and too liquid.
It splits, changes just by looking at it. Stability and order are ideas
based on the fear that our very existence is not of bigger value. Any
attempted system of order
give us the illusion that our way to see the world matters and that we
are able to understand and stability
gives us the illusion that we are not rushing towards death and decay at
least for a moment.
Also mentioning the semantic web doesn't help. Those guys can never agree.
Google doesn't incorporate it because of a disagreeing structure and their
corporate agenda.
so far my five pennies, anyone else?
