Weinberger celebrates the "new power" of the digital disorder. Certainly, his claim "Instead of everything having its place, it's better if things can get assigned multiple places simultaneously" (14). Clearly this is true for commerce and information, but what does this mean for writing?
As a thought exercise, locate two examples from Weinberger's text that make you nervous (or at least wary) about the multiplicity and the hyperconnectivity of knowledge acquistion and dissemination. In two paragraphs, demonstrate how third-order practices might actually fail. Or, show how drawing lines for and drafting hierarchies for knowledge might actually be preferable to Weinberger's observations.
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Weinberger's statement means that writing can fall under many different types of categories. Something that is entertaining can also be informative. This is becoming the way many people write. Essays meant to inform the reader are including entertaining anecdotes that make the writers message easy to listen to. In my history class we read the book "Terrors of Ice and Darkness" the novel focuses on a historic expedition to the north pole and includes the actual journal entries from members of the crew. At the same time the story is being told by a fictional character who is witnessing a fictional explore become obsessed with embarking on the same expedition. Do to the blend the novel can be categorized as either fiction or non-fiction. Writing is becoming harder and harder to categorize do to the complexity of how it is being written.
ReplyDeleteOne part of the text that really did make me nervous was the fact that "Bill Gates bought the Bettmann Archive, the most prestigious collection of historic photos in the United States, so he could bury it."(17) To me that is very frightening. The man who will probably be know as the father of the digital age doesn't trust in his own creations. He doesn't feel that uploading images to a computer and the internet is safe for there preservation. He thinks they are safer buried in a cave. That is frightening. It is like a doctor prescribing medicine that he would never take.
Another part of the text that made me a little nervous was when it said "Search on Google for 'American history,'...you'll get 750 million web pages"(16) I did it turns out that there is more like 775 million pages. Now i know it isn't right but some times I like to read the last page of a book before I start it. You can't do that on google I tried to get to the last page...you cant once you get to the 80th page it gives you about 12 hyper links each connected to 80 more pages and this continues. A never ending source of information...the ultimate cliff hanger.
David Weinberger introduces the third order of order in his text, and emphasizes how the miscellaneousness of this digital order creates a more effective scheme of organization. Its ability to allow its users to apply limitless tags to a file has certainly made the third order of order the easiest and fastest way to locate a desired article, picture, sound-byte, or video. However, this method of organization also has the risk of tarnishing the reliability of information. Weinberger states, "We are rapidly miscellanizing our world, breaking things out of their old organizational structures, and enabling individuals to sort and order them on the fly" (96). His assertion has both positive and negative consequences. While allowing anyone to modify and "miscellanize" our information does provide for more tags and faster results, it also runs the risk of publishing incorrect information. A person, for example, can update a Wikipedia entry with information that is wrong, only half true, or purely opinion. We need to be sure we can trust the information we are collecting, however in the third order of order, it is not always clear if our information is from a reliable source.
ReplyDelete"The miscellaneous order", according to Weinberger, "is changing how we think the world itself is organized and-perhaps more important-who we think has the authority to tell us so" (23). I believe that this is Weinberger's strongest and most striking claim in his text. The idea that we all can contribute to the order of information is both liberating and nerve-wracking. We all like to feel powerful and feel as though we can contribute to things we care about. However, people do go tread through four or more years of college for a reason; they are the experts, the ones we should be getting our information from, rather than the local kid in his basement. In the first and second orders of order, you have the assurance that a trained professional has reviewed the data you are collecting and know that there is a high probability it is accurate. However in the third order there is an invisible authority, and there is no way of truly knowing whether we can trust our information. Therefore the aspects of the third order of order, which it prides itself on, may actually prove unsuccessful in the long and result in the failure of the system.
I have always thought of writing as a very individual process; we each have our own voice that sneaks out into our words whether we want it to or not. Weinberger claims that, "Instead of everything having its place, it's better if things can get assigned multiple places simultaneously." (14) But do we actually want writing - our writing - to be in five places at once? For me, having my writing saved in three different folders and posted to two separate blogs and five websites does not sound appealing, because I have lost exactly what I think writing is: individuality. By having numerous assigned spots for writing, there are so many more possibilities for our thoughts and ideas to be stolen, to be changed, or to even just get lost in the shuffle of Google. I don't know if I would appreciate a book as much if I had more options than I even needed to read it. There is an excitement in heading to the bookstore, perusing the shelves, and coming across exactly the story I've been waiting for. Yes, it may be easier if I could simply search for the story on Google or Bing and avoid even leaving my house, but where is the fun in that?
ReplyDeleteDavid Weinberger loves his orders of order, especially the third, digital one. Technology is an amazing gift; we reap the benefits of it every day, oftentimes without even realizing it. When discussing the third order of order, Weinberger often uses the example of tagging digital photos. While explaining how the third order is helping us sort these pictures out, Weinberger explains, "What's clear is that however we solve the photo crisis, it will be by adding more information to images, because the solution to the overabundance of information is more information." (13) This may seem like an okay idea, but it makes me a bit worried. The point of tagging is to find pictures faster, and keep better track of them. But if we keep adding more and more information, we are making it harder for ourselves to keep track of not just the information we already have out there, but now the information we are adding on top of that. This does not stop at just photographs on Flickr.com; this extends to anything we digitally store. When discussing the new way medical information is handled, Weinberger states, "The miscellanizing of this information not only breaks it out of its traditional organizational categories but also removes the implicit authority granted by being published in the paper world." (22) Doctors who previously found prestige in having their discoveries or achievements printed up are losing their fame; anyone can post something they've found out somewhere on the internet. It goes back to individuality, specialness, and how that can be lost in the third order of order.
For a recent art class I took, I used JSTOR-the online library- for my research on the statues "the dying gaul" and "the suicidal gaul". When I put these titles into the search engine, it came up with the articles that used the words the most. That means, it would come up with medical papers about diseases where people are 'dying,' psychology essays about 'suicidal' tendencies, and historical documents about the 'gauls.' Of course, this problem was easily fixed simply by putting quotation marks around "dying gaul." But still, I had to search through documents that were titled "the Dying Gaul" and the equally plentiful amount of documents that simply mentioned the work in passing. The documents are not actually stored through importance of the information they are withholding, but just tagged as the words used in the papers.
ReplyDeleteWhen everything becomes miscellaneous, everything becomes cluttered. A google search of "Henry Ford" will come up with not only the mogul inventor, but John Ford films staring Henry Fonda, documents about Henry Kissenger and Gerald Ford, and Harrison Ford's role in 'Regarding Henry'.
We seem to be relying too heavily on the miscellaneous. Wine-burger writes "Even if you use Wikipedia's alphabetical index, the pages are not really in alphabetical order" [98]. The information is stored, rather than in the systematical order that has been doing humans right for some few thousand odd years, in a clusterfuck of information that is put together only through languages like html that the average person does not read.
When everything is stored through inhuman means, what is to happen when Wikipedia picks up a memory-loss virus, when HAL decides to betray his human creators, when we run out of electrical energy sources, or when the seventh seal opens and the apocalypse is among us? Where documents survive book burnings due to wide publishing, leaving all our knowledge in the mythical hard drive is like putting all our money in a Madoff investment, and it could end up with us having nothing.