Talk by David Weinberger the author of Everything is Miscellaneous at iBookWatch.com
Excerpt from ALA TechSource review: This is, I repeat, a dangerous book. Ban it, burn it, or take it to heart. The most dangerous part of this book is not that Weinberger says these things, and so much more: the danger comes if we don’t listen.
Good Stuff
I listened/watched last night before I fell asleep and made a few notes. Very interesting. Here’s what I took away.
Libraries are designed to keep ideas apart. There is no single way to organize the world. We just can’t agree on it.
But digitally, it’s different, it changes the rules we’ve had to follow, like DDC.
The first order, you organize the things themselves, then, second order, you separate out the metadata, like a card catalog, by excluding a large amount of data from the items, third order, everything is digitized. You have the entire item. You’re essentially able to put one leaf on multiple branches. This means messiness is a virtue, rather than a drawback. All the connections enrich things, it’s just the connections. This means that the data & the metadata are essentially the same thing, e.g. searching an author and book contents at the same time. Data is what you’re looking for, while metadata is what you know, but digitizing everything makes everything metadata, it allows us to use everything to find what we’re looking for, rather than just the metadata. The order things are in doesn’t really matter, and there’s no ownership of how things are ordered. Now the people in charge of the stuff don’t control how we find it. The users get to decide what things are “about.”
We’re going to thinking the world is organized in one way, by excluding things, to just including everything, and finding it via the powerful tools. It’s now easier to preserve everything, it takes too much work to delete it because it costs time to make these decisions. The people looking for stuff will do the organizing and pulling together what they need. You can’t know what people’s interests are and what they really want.
We no longer need to keep things simple. They can be complex and people can find what they need. People add to it, rather than subtract. People look for complexity., different and interesting. Having it all public and digitized we now have made knowledge publicly negotiable. It makes people functionally irrelevant if they don’t participate. Knowledge somehow becomes negotiable. The infrastructure of meaning is additive and no longer controlled by a centralized authority. Every link makes a connection of information and a layer of meaning that can be used by others. Knowledge becomes a great reflection of what we’re interested in.
The number of people who actually do anything like this is very small. It’s all about participation, but few are choosing to participate. People who are doing this are doing it for social reasons, it connects them with others.
‘We’?Re:Good Stuff
If few are doing it then how can the implication be that we as a whole are changing?
I disagree that there is no single way to organize the world. Here is where library science is actual science, and like any science the larger the scale the more difficult it can be to fathom, but that doesn’t make it unfathomable. Asimov’s psychohistory is the beginning of just such an idea.
Re:’We’?Re:Good Stuff
>>If few are doing it then how can the implication be that we as a whole are changing?
Yeah, that’s certainly the weakest part of the argument. Or maybe it’s just one of the many weak parts. Is there really enough people who work at this stuff that it’ll really work? Maybe. Wikipedia shows there is I guess. It seems to be it doesn’t take more than a small minority to make it work.
>>I disagree that there is no single way to organize the world.
Heh… You’re a librarian. We look at the world differently.
Re:’We’?Re:Good Stuff
It takes a minority to allow Wikipedia to exist but that is not changing the behavior of the majority. I wrote a short bit a long time ago and I still stand by it, the majority will always need guidance and the universe will always require a certain amount of organization for that guidance to be provided.
Re:’We’?Re:Good Stuff
-It takes a minority to allow Wikipedia to exist but that is not changing the behavior of the majority.-
But the majority are using what the minority has created, you can use Wikipedia but never contribute. That is what I got from that talk.
That the small numbers of people who spend their lives on sites such as Wikipedia and Flikr etc are the ones shaping our experience of the online world. We are utilising their work, just as we do when a company does it for us by giving categories to index by.
I think that the basic point he was making is that the physical world worked to a certain point with singular categorisation systems but as soon as you go digital it does become all about the metadata.
That does ignore one element and that is the data has to originate somewhere. With say Dewey you have subject headings that are in effect abstract, but when you come to some digital material you are being much more specific. The metadata attached to a digital item still refers to an original item, in one of his examples the presidents speech. That information is hosted on the Whitehouse page. It has to have a home that is provided for it, but the term Presidential Speeches in Dewey needs no location, no end product, no actual speeches, only a subject reference.
Without the actual original source online you can’t correctly apply a group of tags (as individually they mean nothing, there is no end context) to something. Online it is not so much a matter of ideas as of actual resources. The tags exist external to the item but they are useless without it whereas with Dewey you have the context with no need to have an eventual end product.*
Isn’t this just a realisation that the digital world is different to the print world?
Can’t see what is so dangerous about that, mind you I’ve not read his book. I’m guessing he’s not saying we should burn all our catalogues and use search engines is he?
* Of course by talking about something online you are automatically creating a new digital icon to define so in a way that solves part of the problem.