Description and judgment

Transparency is the new objectivity, says David Weinberger:

The problem with objectivity is that it tries to show what the world looks like from no particular point of view, which is like wondering what something looks like in the dark.

Yes and or no. If the object is an object, and one is describing it, there is some sense in which, through trial and error and comparative observations, one can determine if the description is more or less accurate, for some purposes, some of the time.

In journalism, of course, the object is rarely an object, in that reified sense. One is dealing with characters, motives, interested speech, commerce, rhetorical ploys, misrepresentations, missing data, dubious sources, events sometimes rooted in earlier events, now hidden from view, veiled, or forgotten, for starters.

Then one is utilizing all sorts of processes of judgment, including the senses, but going beyond that to intuition, research, bullshit detection, critical thinking, imaginative interrogation, official records etc.

Transparency of the reporter as source can then be a valued element in his readers' (and editors') judgments of her/his total process of judgment. Prior to that, transparency of the reporter to her/himself is also a great plus, unless one works for Fox.

But neither one or the other of these transparencies, though offering significant interpretive clues, equals objectivity, so far as I can see, as neither speaks to the quality of the thinking, research, or intuitional sensibility informing complex acts of journalistic judgment.

re-esemplastic rethread

Afterthought with regard to the thread in the preceding post, much of which focuses on the Berkman Center's mode of presenting talks. For me, the Berkman Center was just cited as an example of how current practice tends to put valuable intellectual property out there and then leave it to its own devices. David Weinberger explains that the Berkman's support of an author like Lewis Hyde has other facets, and that putting his lunchtime talk out there is better than not doing so, even if follow up responses to it do not get tracked.

I want to move off of Berkman to try to make a point that otherwise might be lost. Conversations don't often neatly begin and end. Some have been going on for a few thousand years. Ten years ago, it was suggested that "markets are conversations," but the definition of "conversation" remained somewhat open-ended, like the thing itself (it extended into a deep and mostly tacit theory of voice, among other things).

We in the US and elsewhere have had the habit, for perhaps too long, of assuming that conversation can be bottled up inside a piece of thingliness - a vessel like a book, a CD, DVD, digital file, painting, etc. -- and presented as a self-sufficient, closed object which can then be sold. I don't think that's what "markets are conversations" was intended to mean, but the closing of the conversation, like the enclosure of the commons, leads to improper notions of something as "a property," and then, "intellectual property."

What if intellect cannot be localized because much of what we think and say is already in a dialogic (or, allegoric) relation to other words that have been thought and said? If intellect doesn't lend itself to a local habitation and a name, then "intellectual property" is an oxymoron, or worse, a senseless grouping of phonemes.

Yet in our daily practice, as we're used to slicing up the stream of time into end-stopped segments, we share and sell moments in larger conversations, themselves moments in even larger conversations.

My point vis a vis Hyde was that even as he spoke of a commons and its loss through stages of enclosure, there was both a fidelity and a betrayal of his thinking in how it was situated. It is freely shared - qua segment, qua object, qua Berkman moment; but by bracketing it off from any further precedent or subsequent context, its necessary relation to its origin and its destiny, its power to bear witness to further repercussions of its own impact, is denied.

This is not merely a Berkman phenomenon; it's a representational phenomenon deriving from a scheme that believes intellectual objects have an integrity which in fact they do not possess.

Twitter might be a helpful gloss: no one on Twitter is the source of any given conversation, nor is it the case that a conversation takes place between the same interlocutors. Conversations are witnessed, piled in on, diverted, commented upon, rejoined, attitudinalized, left for dead, by a series of folks who may never directly speak to one another. On Twitter, conversation might be said the be the soul of indiscretion.

So, where the roots of ideas of intellect and property are being seriously examined, the representation of moments in their conversations would do well to explore how they can bring forward the links among themselves and their exfoliations.

Desideratum: A reverse wordcloud - where the words in a post that are cited, linked to, retweeted, etc., grow and (somehow) contain links to posts that link to them. Sort of like Eliot's Tradition and the Individual Talent, where later texts within the tradition contain and esemplastically transform earlier ones.

Hyde and seek

Interesting talk by Lewis Hyde on the commons - thanks to Jon "Wirearchy" Husband for the pointer. David Weinberger live-blogged it here.

What is proper to Hyde's talk - just the talk? It seems the Berkman Center thinks so. The Berkman offers a ton of interesting talks on its site. What's not here is any follow-up discussion, exploration. Where does responsibility toward ideas and their dissemination begin and end?

New over there

Fwiw, a new post on the FASTforward blog: An adjacency of opposites.

Another open access resource

The Public Library of Science

Pointed at by David Weinberger here. Interesting to note it's cited in the course of his analyzing the argument of Andrew Keen's book.

The core principles of PLOS:

1. Open access. All material published by the Public Library of Science, whether submitted to or created by PLoS, is published under an open access license that allows unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
2. Excellence. PLoS strives to set the highest standards for excellence in everything we do: in content, style, and aesthetics of presentation; in editorial performance at every level; in transparency and accessibility to the scientific community and public; and in educational value.
3. Scientific integrity. PLoS is committed to a fair, rigorous editorial process. Scientific quality and importance are the sole considerations in publication decisions. The basis for decisions will be communicated to authors.
4. Breadth. Although pragmatic considerations require us to focus initially on publishing high-impact research in the life sciences, we intend to expand our scope as rapidly as practically possible, to provide a vehicle for publication of other valuable scientific or scholarly articles.
5. Cooperation. PLoS welcomes and actively seeks opportunities to work cooperatively with any group (scientific/scholarly societies, physicians, patient advocacy groups, educational organizations) and any publisher who shares our commitment to open access and to making scientific information available for the good of science and the public.
6. Financial fairness. As a nonprofit organization, PLoS charges authors a fair price that reflects the actual cost of publication. However, the ability of authors to pay publication charges will never be a consideration in the decision whether to publish.
7. Community engagement. PLoS was founded as a grassroots organization and we are committed to remaining one, with the active participation of practicing scientists at every level. Every publishing decision has at its heart the needs of the constituencies that we serve (scientists, physicians, educators, and the public).
8. Internationalism. Science is international. PLoS aims to be a truly international organization by providing access to the scientific literature to anyone, anywhere; by publishing works from every nation; and by engaging a geographically diverse group of scientists in the editorial process.
9. Science as a public resource. Our mission of building a public library of science includes not only providing unrestricted access to scientific research ideas and discoveries, but developing tools and materials to engage the interest and imagination of the public and helping non-scientists to understand and enjoy scientific discoveries and the scientific process.

What matters for Sven, the anti-miscellaneous man

I'm talking about print reviewing here. For as exciting as the blogosphere is as a supplement, as a place of provocation and response, it is too fluid in its nature ever to focus our widely diverging cultural energies. A hopscotch through the referential enormity of argument and opinion cannot settle the ground under our feet. To have a sense of where we stand, and to hold not just a number of ideas in common, but also some shared way of presenting those ideas, we continue to need, among many others, The New York Times, the Globe, the Tribune, the LA Times, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. -- Sven Birkerts via wood s lot

Birkerts' four-panel dis-ease with blogs (zero links, two vaguely noodled examples) culminates in a call for a return to print, to the stable, the vertical, the non-miscellaneous: to corporate media-controlled newspapers. Blogs are too snaky, too id-dy, too ephemeral. His is a passion for the solid, for some sturdy, super-egoey bit of ground to stand on. He freely grants that the Arnoldian ideal was a chimaera, except possibly "in Ivy enclaves and a few nodal centers in post-war New York," but dismisses the possibility that conversations happening now transglobally among literate folks can produce value.

The implicit immediacy and ephemerality of "post" and "update," the deeply embedded assumption of referentiality (linkage being part of the point of blogging), not to mention a new of-the-moment ethos among so many of the bloggers (especially the younger ones) favors a less formal, less linear, and essentially unedited mode of argument. While more traditional print-based standards are still in place on sites like Slate and the online offerings of numerous print magazines, many of the blogs venture a more idiosyncratic, off-the-cuff style, a kind of "I've been thinking . . ." approach. At some level it's the difference between amateur and professional. What we gain in independence and freshness we lose in authority and accountability.

Here's what's odd: The for-want-of-a-better-word seeming confusion of "mattering" with the materiality of the medium. What matters for Sven is not the words, but the matter of them. If the cultural conversation is not in print (ideally in newsprint in a major USian city), it is immediately suspect. At no point does Sven take up any conversation, any discourse, any attempt to produce meaning on a blog. Yet he appears comfortable dismissing the entire phenomenon with a suspiciously self-deprecating wag of his graying locks:

Experiencing this, I become the gradually graying reviewer again. I can't help it. I am in every way a man of print, shaped by its biases and hierarchies, tinged by its not-so-buried elitist premises. My impulse is to argue that if the Web at large is the old Freudian "polymorphous perverse," that libidinally undifferentiated miasma of yearnings and gratifications, unbounded and free, then culture itself -- what we have been calling "culture" at least since the Enlightenment -- is the emergent maturity that constrains unbounded freedom in the interest of mattering.

Here Birkerts joins that other master anti-miscelleneator, Andrew Keen, in calling for the de-emergence of voices that happen not to consist of the right stuff. (Calling it "print" is somewhat misleading, since blogs are mostly written, therefore at least emulate print.) Keen, who poses quite self-consciously in his blog as the anti-matter of David Weinberger:

Could Weinberger exist without me? Could I exist with him? Is this a publisher's plot or just the public effluence of a bad marriage?

Effluence smeffluence. Messers Keen and Birkerts, Arnoldian upholders of each other, ought to know that if they wish to distinguish what is the matter, and they discover that it is, in fact, the matter, then deviations from the material rules cannot be tolerated. Mr. Keen, who says "I'm currently reading everything about authority that I can get my hands on" ought to know that after the joys of dead trees and ink, nothing is more basic to the shared way of presenting...ideas in print than the ordering principles of grammar. Behold, then his handling of the apostrophe, and weep:


O tempura, o boar's head. The Apostrophe Protection Society has been advised.

See also this on one of the two blogs Sven noodles.

Update: Clay Shirky takes issue with Sven almost as an aside to a commentary on Nick Carr's criticism of Everything is Miscellaneous:

Birkerts frames the changing landscape not as a personal annoyance but as A Threat To Culture Itself. As he puts it “…what we have been calling “culture” at least since the Enlightenment — is the emergent maturity that constrains unbounded freedom in the interest of mattering.”

This is silly. The constraints of print were not a product of “emergent maturity.” They were accidents of physical production.

Drilling: The miscellaneous and the marvelous

Inside Everything is Miscellaneous is an argument couched as going on (summing liberally here) between Aristotle and his sober ilk, all authority and taxonomy and arresting, hierarchic power on the one hand, and the miscellaneous hoardes, all amateur and passion and giving and open-ended on the other:

The way we've organized knowledge has been largely determined by these four properties of knowledge [single, unambiguous, filtered, dependent upon institutions]. We've tried try to settle on a single, comprehensive framework for knowledge, with categories so clear and comprehensive that experts can put each thing in its proper place. Institutions grew to maintain the knowledge framework. Their ability to certify experts and to vouch for knowledge made them powerful and sometimes rich.

And here's Walter Benjamin mapping something of the same conceptual terrain somewhat differently:

"For tradition puts the the past in order, not just chronologically but first of all systematically in that it separates the positive from the negative, the orthodox from the heretical, and which is obligatory and relevant from the mass of irrelevant or merely interesting opinions and data. The collector's passion, on the other hand, is not only unsystematic but borders on the chaotic, not so much because it is a passion as because it is not primarily kindled by the quality of the object--something that is classifiable--but is inflamed by its "genuineness," its uniqueness, something that defies any systematic classification. Therefore, while tradition discriminates, the collector levels all differences; and this leveling--so that "the positive and the negative" . . . predilection and rejection are here closely contiguous." (Schriften II, 313), cited by Hannah Arendt in her Intro to Illuminations.

Weinberger:

So, when the miscellaneous shakes our certainty in the nature of knowledge, more than the future of the card catalog is at stake. Because a third order miscellany is digital, not physical, we no longer have to agree on a single framework. Things have their _places_, not a single place. We get to create our own categories, ones that suit our way of thinking. Experts can be helpful, but in the age of the miscellaneous they and their institutions are no longer in charge of our ideas.

Benjamin's polarity is far more charged with value than with matters of the true. As Arendt notes, Benjamin puts into contagious adjacency the collector and the revolutionary. Both are good at breaking established orders. Take a suicide bomber and pin him, wriggling, to the wall. His purpose is subverted, at least changed: he's no longer in service to Allah, but at the whim of the collector, who might merely be admiring his shoes, or his special grimace. Because the collector is not about rational ordering, or even passional use, but more about the whims of the performance of collecting.

"The true, greatly misunderstood passion of the collector is always anarchistic, destructive. For this is its dialectics: to combine with loyalty to an object, to individual items, to things sheltered in his care, a subborn subversive protest against the typical, the classifiable." Benjamin, "Lob der Puppe," cited by Arendt in her intro.

Arendt discovers in "the collector's whimsical perspective" the peculiar bias toward the broken, the fragmentary, which she might extend to the century just past:

The figure of the collector, as old-fashioned as that of the flaneur, could assume such eminently modern features in Benjamin because history itself--that is, the break in tradition which took place at the beginning of this century--had already relieved him of this task of destruction and he only needed to bend down, as it were, to select his precious fragments from the pile of debris.

Odd, that "as it were" . . .. How come this rubble, instead of quiescently waiting to be selected, as it also does with T.S.-these-fragments-I-have-shored-against-my-ruins-Eliot, doesn't fly up and hit the collector upside his head? Why is the collector, at this violent juncture of tradition, sheltered from the storm and able to exercise his fancy?

I don't know the answer to that question. But the gesture of bending down, as it were, to collect the relictoid -- torn untimely* from its context, from whatever once made it typical, and without which it is defamiliarized, reverting to a purposeless dumb monstrosity -- is a key feature of fashionable blogs.

Blogs whose governing intelligences appear to be no worse for wear than Walt's collector or T.S.'s deflective self.

If Arendt and Benjamin (and Agamben and others) are witnessing a deep and upending rift in tradition and correct in assessing its scope, this might lend context to some of what Weinberger is getting at. Although David frames much of his discussion in the geekly mode of digital access and metadata, what he's pointing to is nothing if not an energetic tearing up of the pea patch:

Customers, patrons, users and citizens are not waiting for permission to take finding and organization information. And we’re doing it not just as individuals. Knowledge—it content and its organization—is becoming a social act.

This energy has been characterized as possessing inordinate strength and resilience. And there is often the claim that the technical has been a key factor in releasing it, if not channelling it, and that's fair. But the seemingly bottomless power of it - witness Wikipedia - has, I suspect, other, deeper roots than Silicon Valley. Arendt:

When he [Benjamin] was working on his study of German tragedy, he boasted of a collection of "over 600 quotations very systematically and clearly arranged" (Briefe I, 339); like the later notebooks, this collection was not an accumulation of excerpts intended to facilitate the writing of the study but constituted the main work -- a mode, Benjamin suggested, of drilling -- with the writing as something secondary.

Benjamin's citations may have been systematically and clearly arranged, but they were torn from their context, their traditional placeholders, tagged and dragged willynilly to a new space in which they could play against each other, in Arendt's words, "in a free-floating state, as it were."

Tearing things from context enables them to float, puts them in a cloud. The excellent thing about clouds, as we are now learning, is that now one element, or polarity, comes forward, and now another. They wax and wane in strangely calm adjacencies.

For Benjamin, as Arendt notes, this was a truer method than attempting to "ruin everything with explanations that seek to provide a causal or systematic connection." Why this is so is, of course, unclear. Were it clear, we could provide a causal or systematic explanation and move on.

Traditionless USians always move on. They do not see there is no moving on.

*via Ray.

Search can create what it seeks and transform how it finds

More about the relation of data and metadata, spurred by David Weinbergers' book, Everything is Miscellaneous, and spinning out of miscellaneous conversations, e.g. here and here:

Query/search can precede data:

“When there is a blackout in New York, the first articles appear in 15 minutes; we get queries in two seconds,” he says. (He is Mr. Singhal, at Google.) #

So the search for data that does not yet exist becomes metadata that helps to create the new data it is proleptically about.

And Google does more than simply build an outsized, digital table of contents for the Web. Instead, it actually makes a copy of the entire Internet — every word on every page — that it stores in each of its huge customized data centers so it can comb through the information faster. Google recently developed a new system that can hold far more data and search through it far faster than the company could before.

The instrument created to search the Net replicates the Net over and over. Is the Internet different because of this? Is it different because its performance transforms what it is?

And, duh, the question that first occurred: Are the replicants of the Net data or metadata?

Setting it free

A link on David Weinberger's blog goes to an interesting article he wrote for the Harvard Business Review entitled If You Love Your Information, Set It Free. Yesterday, when I clicked on it, an interstitial something or other advised that one could quote up to 500 words of the article and no more. That bit of reintermediation doesn't seem to be there today, but if one searches for the article at the Review's site, one arrives at this:



It's unclear what exactly I am purchasing if I purchase copyright permission. Am I paying for the right to set David's article free? Am I under some limitation to be specified in the fine print of whatever I get when I buy permission?

What exactly is the institutional understanding at Harvard of the meaning of the work of someone like David, a Berkman Center fellow who has been an apostle for freeing information, whose latest book prophetically and proleptically sees it as inevitable?

What if I gave myself permission to cause the article to appear, say, here, without purchasing a download, a pdf, or copyright permission?

speed bumps

David Weinberger comments here on the preceding post about JSTOR. Meanwhile, having recently read Everything is Miscellaneous, I can't help but think of its relevance to JSTOR, and, conversely, to consider implications of the JSTOR-Y for David's argument/vision.

Toward the end of chapter 1, having described in some detail the Bettmann Archive and contrasted it with Corbis, and both their modes of organization with that of Flickr, David goes on to say:

We have entire industries and institutions built on the fact that the paper order severely limits how things can be organized. Museums, educational curricula, newspapers, the travel industry, and television schedules are all based on the assumption that in the second-order world, we need experts to go through information, ideas and knowledge and put them neatly away.

But now we -- the customers, the employees, anyone -- can route around the second order. We can confront the miscellaneous directly in all its unfulfilled glory. We can do it ourselves, and, more significantly, we can do it together, figuring out the arrangements that make sense for us now and the new arrangements that make sense a minute later. Not only can we find what we need faster, but traditional authorities cannot maintain themselves by insisting that we have to go to them.

"Isla: En Mi Carcel de Papel"

Two - uh, three - quick points:

1. The "paper order" of scholarly journals, thanks to the work of JSTOR, is subject to vast abbreviation. Instead of requiring duplicate tons of paper redundantly delivered to and stored in thousands of expensive buildings, one set, well cared for, or two, or at most a very, very few, are all that's required to meet the needs of a readership that, by virtue of the modality of that abbreviation, could now be expanded to include virtually everybody. This is a vast and stunning alteration of the first-order economy.

2. We have a Pisgah view of these journals thanks to Google's crawl. Without that algorithm spidering through 23 million pages, we would still be subject to the rule of paper.

3. We are still subject to the constraints of paper insofar as the business model of JSTOR has a ways to evolve before it can revolutionize its gatekeeping function to allow open access.

It seems that between the prisonhouse of paper and the unfettered bliss of what "we" can do with universal miscellaneity lie some bumps in the road: the event of Google, and the encrustations of first and second order economies, at the very least.

Not Weinberger's fault

When Zeuxis unveiled his painting of grapes, they appeared so luscious and inviting that birds flew down from the sky to peck at them. Zeuxis then asked Parrhasius to pull aside the curtain from his painting. When it was discovered that the curtain itself was painted on the surface -- the curtain was Parrhasius' painting, Zeuxis was forced to concede defeat. Wikipedia

Certain recent posts here at IMproPRieTies might seem rather random. What could Everything is Miscellaneous, JSTOR, the White House Press Corps and the Extraordinary and Plenipotent Roland E. Arnall possibly have in common? I'm not sure. All I know is, after reading David Weinberger's book, and writing a bit about it, a certain stimulus deriving from that reading seemed to propel me to "voice" certain, uh, reservations I've had about, among other things, the JSTOR Fortress of Knowledge.

Weinberger's take on miscellaneity is provocative. Even with Mr. Plenipotentiary Arnall - not that David in any directed way "caused" my interest in him - but when, in EiM, he speaks of shifting from an Aristotelian order of proper nomenclature, personhood and taxonomy to multiple, more open orders that are not so much contesting each others' claims but rather learning how to play well with each other, and to discover that knowledge resides between, not in, knowers, one of the first flags for me is the potential for fraud.

The space of fraud is the space between what something is said to be and what it "really is." Under an Aristotelian mode of knowing as representation, fraud is certainly possible -- and begins perhaps with the stories of Zeuxis, an artist Aristotle apparently did not care for, fooling the eye of the beholder -- but this falseness can be checked, unveiled, dis-covered through a penetrating effort of investigation (or by sheer chance); it can be seen to be other than the truth.

These considerations I think apply meaningfully to Journalism's failing to coincide with itself: News becomes news of the reception of the news of the reception of the... en abîme.

If everything is miscellaneous, it becomes ever so much more difficult to differentiate claims about some thing from the thing, because, per the argument, things per se, essences, no longer anchor the realm of signs. Metadata would appear to become increasingly difficult to distinguish from data - what is said about things replaces things with more of what is said about things: Reality dissolves into a welter of voices about reality, internet intercourse upends the stable epistemology of traditional discourse, rendering efforts to arrive at "truth" more problematic. Instead of a truth model of veil/unveil, we have -- no, in Weinberger's sense, we are becoming -- Parrhesian: all veil.

Obviously I'm still trying to figure out what David is saying, and why I'm finding what he's saying so provocative. While I wonder about these things, I'd be curious to hear whether other readers of the book find themselves provoked into vocalizing a bit more than usual.

And lest I forget, there's an interesting looking article about Aristotle and the Painters by Graham Zanker. Would have loved to have read it, but it's inside the anal crevass of JSTOR.

Insinuative metadata

If information really wants to be miscellaneous, as David Weinberger would have it, this is good news for those thirsting for the sort of data that rarely rises to the level of speech because it has no commercial value to a vendor corporation or to a metadata corporation such as an ad agency.

Regardless of its value to the public.

Some sites that offer to waltz repressed or inexplicit data into official/corporate datastreams:

Oil Standard

Oil Standard is a web browser plug-in that converts all prices from U.S. Dollars into the equivalent value in barrels of crude oil. (Mike Mandiberg)

Delocator

Enter a zip code to locate a noncorporate cafe, book store, or movie theater near you. (xtine hansen)

Personal Kyoto

Track your residential or commercial electric usage - if you're in NYC. (Ben Engebreth)

The Real Costs

Firefox plug-in that inserts emissions data into travel related e-commerce websites. The first version adds CO2 emissions information to airfare websites such as Orbitz.com, United.com, Delta.com, etc. Following versions will work with car directions, car rental, and shipping websites. Think of it like the nutritional information labeling on the back of food... except for emissions. (Mike Mandiberg)

(All the above cribbed from an IDC post by Mandiberg).

Got any more? Put these next to the thinking on metadata and implicit knowledge in Everything is Miscellaneous.

Tongue Stew: Everything is Miscellaneous, part 2

The first part of comments on Everything is Miscellaneous is here.

Here beginneth Part the Seconde:

I was going to write about how David Weinberger manages to talk about large changes without making us anxious about the new order slouching toward MySpace. I had a lengthy chunk of it written, mostly dealing with my doubts that he does justice to the ramifications of the change he's forecasting. (The tree of knowledge is central to the imagery of the text. As that tree falls, do such ramifications cease to ramify? Or do they continue, but, hidden in miscellaneity, become harder to trace?)

Anyway, here's part what I had in mind to say:

David Weinberger is talking about large changes -- like the murder of the Logos. For purposes of the narrative, the corpus of Hamlet becomes a prime example of the inessentiality, the blurring of things we like to think are monolithic sources; kingly authoritative things. Some might sense the interstitial rustling of a kingly ghost, the crumble of royal relations, a regicidal rottenness that is about to stink up the understairs.

But EiM mostly steers clear of the privates, the nether parts. The scenes are set in bright kitchens, underground archives, museum offices, Staples stores (Bias Outing: I avoid Staples like the plague -- that anal order, those white, white walls and the bins upon bins of exact replicas of pens and pencils and blotters and paper clips makes me yearn for Mexican markets, or a gatling gun); the narrative's set lighting is usually pretty bright (except in Eleanor Rosch's office) and order reigns, wildness has been tamed.

The settings, the interviews, the characters and examples all bespeak the bustle of salutary change:

Whether we’re doing it on purpose or simply by leaving tracks behind us, the public construction of meaning is the most important project of the next hundred years. 222

It's at moments like this that I want to set my phaser on Biblical and say:

David, as you know, the Goliath whose fall you are announcing is nothing less than what Western Philosophy since before Aristotle has called the Logos. You're telling us the story of Babel, only wonderfully changed for Web-based audiences. According to the patriarchal preferences of the Old Testament, the loss of the original tongue was considered a sad falling off from humankind's power to build not just towers, but the social orders of the cities that would populate them –- a collapse that left men's kind profoundly weakened, dulled, unerected, stupefied. Now you're telling us that the new enriched matrix of idiolectal variations which is supplanting the old order will enable us to regain "social knowing" via multifaceted categories, and ever more complex webs of relations. You seem to be saying that the crumbling Logos cookie will return us to a far richer stew of meanings without apparent loss of the benefits of the very thing that is said to be getting usurped.

===

I still want to say all that. But the more I think about EiM, and the better the feel I get for the rigor of the thinking in the book, the more I'm inclined to want to explore how it negotiates that tricky move which is its promise. A nos moutons.

More later then.

If Everything is Miscellaneous, why does David Weinberger seem not so concerned?

The potential for connections from the trivial to the urgent is characteristic of the new miscellany. We are busily creating as many of these meaningful connections as we can. Everything is Miscellaneous, 212.

Miscellaneous observation: Some of the harshest words in EiM are reserved for paper: (paraphrasing: Paper is trapped in physical dimensions. Two of them. It can only fit so much data, it’s bulky, it forces our metadata into shapes that are limiting, arbitrary, coercive.) David Weinberger’s critique of paper, nonetheless, wrote itself into existence on paper.

The “revolutionary” frisson, to the extent there is one in David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous, derives from the idea of going beyond, or breaking the arche, the organon, the order of things as we’ve known it. Not just replacing it with another taxonomy, but rather encountering the moment that is the historical and critical threshold of rupture, the crisis from and within which the book is written.

As we invent new principles of organization that make sense in a world of knowledge freed from physical constraints, information doesn't just want to be free. It wants to be miscellaneous. (7)

Throughout, Weinberger writes about these large matters with a miniaturist’s precision. He writes from the far side of a cultural divide which, if he’s right, is momentous. And from that coign of vantage, he sends us a sort of philosophical picaresque, a tale of ancient systems and once logical projects that are now sinking into the shifting sands of a far larger, more complex and blustery digital universe.

He does it so smoothly that even for good readers, it’s hard to be sure anything has really happened. Shelley Powers’ critical reading for example seems to rest on the assumption that there’s nothing really new here. That there is some stable additional order that is being overlaid, and that the first ones in will be the fathers of a new arche:

On 'mess', David wrote, Third-order messes reverse entropy, becoming more meaningful as they become messier, with more relationships built in. He uses Flickr and the site's ability to evaluate associated tags and derive clusters, as evidence for this proclamation. Yet we're finding out, more and more, that people who want to participate in Flickr as a social enterprise actually modify their tags in order to deliberately place their photos into clusters.

In other words, they do not participate in tagging as a chaotic enterprise, but literally one that is based on a pre-defined order.

Powers appears to be envisioning what Weinberger calls "the third order" (relations built upon digital techniques, e.g., tagging, blogging, commenting, unique identifiers, etc.) as another mode of genealogy, the birth of another system with its own consistent means of locating things. Richer than a card catalog, but essentially performing the same function, with the same sweeping hieratic control over categories. The first ones on the scene get to establish them:

Though the order itself may seem to be derived from the masses, in actuality, just like with Wikipedia, it derives from a small group of early users–founders, if you will.

I think Weinberger is saying that there are no more fathers – there are only children who are playing at order, playing with order, playing with all the possible modes of order and disorder. Playing so busily they might not have noticed Dad is missing.

Weinberger seems to be peering into a near future in which usage rewrites the dictionary – we'll no longer ask Merriam Webster to tell us what a word means; instead, we discover a bewildering new assortment of meanings for a word deriving from innovative and unrelated instances of speech. Each time we open our digital mouths, we’re jumping into the moving Heraclitean river, creating reference points on the fly – “points” which distend, get modified in conversation, completely disappear as purposes and ideas change. Panta rei. The Devil take the hindmost as Merriam Webster’s orderly columns of carefully defined words smush into a blur…

If we don’t see this as a big thing, we'll be misled by David’s witty and prosaic examples into missing the point. I joined Powers in wondering what the big deal is if all we’re doing digitally is adding tags, blogs and other linking features to prior ordering systems. There would seem to be little reason for this book. Now, after wrestling with it a bit, I’m persuaded that David is talking about a sufficiently large change as to give us pause. His prose might sound unconcerned, but we probably should be concerned.

(More tomorrow) Update: David Weinberger has helpfully commented here. More soon.