The first chapter of David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous introduces us to 'the orders of order'. The first is the sorting of items themselves, such as dishes. The second is the use of physical items to reference certain aspects of physical items, such as a traditional card catalog. The third order, to which the book seems dedicated, is the new digital capability of organizing data in an ever-changing way.
Of course Flickr is probably the best example of this, allowing photographs to be tagged by anyone who views them. Since this site was referenced in the book, I'll instead put forward one of my own favorites, Delicious, a social bookmarking site. Eschewing the traditional sorting of bookmarks into a tree-style folder system, Delicious allows users to add as many tags as they can conceive to any given entry. This is remarkably useful when attempting to find a site visited some months ago with only a few spotty memories about the content. Although the tagging is hardly as fully-featured as Flickr's - each user tags their own entries, and one URL will have as many tag sets as it has people saving it - the site is still an excellent step towards the ideal dynamic organization Weinberger seems to advocate.
Delicious serves as an example for the book's second chapter as well. Though posts are presented in list form, and therefore must be sorted in some fashion - in this case only allowing alphabetical or most recent - one can still use the tags on each entry to find other sites of related content, in essence representing the "joints of reality" Weinberger references. In essence, this allows us perhaps for the first time to navigate the contents of reality entirely by the whims of its participants.
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"We inevitably make sense of what we experience. But the shape of sense is changing. We used to think ideas were well ordered when each was in the box that expressed its essence and the boxes were arranged neatly and elegantly. The world abetted us in this. Attributes tend to come in predictable bundles: Melons that smell good when their ends are squeezed tend to taste good, and animals with feathers and two feet tend to also have beaks and wings. We can cluster items by some of their attributes and reliably have other attributes come along. These separable but related traits and attributes are the real joints of nature, to use Plato's phrase one last time." (Weinberger 229)
ReplyDeleteDon't you get the feeling that there is a big BUT at the end of that passage? Weinberger spends much of the book building that BUT. (This passage is from the last chapter.)