This is a reading response I wrote on the book Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger for my class on Information Agencies.
I live in a world of multiple planes of order. I do not see librarians, archivists, professors, professionals, experts as essentialist 19th century British gentlemen of the Queen’s land who need unchangeable structure and order (with them on top). Weinberger has many intelligent, extremely fascinating things to say about the third order unbound by the material world, but his biggest drawback is his snarky comments referring to what he perceives to be self-titled “experts.”
Weinberger sees the coming world as a social one, constructed out of personal meaning, which I argue can actually isolate us. If we create a world according to us based on our own meaning, we work within the parameters of our personal vocabulary. We can perhaps take a class with an interesting professor on a new subject – a categorized direction of study with a self-titled expert – to get links to the new language, suggested articles to read, arguments to ponder over. But you can’t learn about “string theory” by searching tags if you do not know of the existence of such a theory, because you do not have the vocabulary for it.
Furthermore, Weinberger assumes much like Microsoft Bing or Facebook that everyone wants to do what their friends do. I traveled in Croatia on my own without any advice from my personal circle of friends; I found all other information in a … book, written by “experts.” I did not feel crushed by their oppressive way of ordering the world. I would not have done nearly as much if I had relied only on my circle of relations. This new social world is somehow supposed to enlighten us without ever letting us out of our bubbles to discover. It does not celebrate the obscure.
Weinberger recognizes and embraces how much more the third order gives us. We are not bound by the colonizers or the state. But are we not still bound? The platforms of Google, Microsoft, and Facebook shape our way of thinking just the same way the Soviet Union can put out posters of harvested wheat to make us forget about the famine. And are we not bound by the fact that not only is there more, but he also expects us to do more? Technology has already sped up our lives, forcing us to feel like the day got shorter, the boundaries between work and play blurred, the expectations for success that much higher. On top of that, he expects us focus on one website – or all websites? – to make it our own, to spend time tagging, to find the explicit in the implicit, to read all discussions “behind” a Wikipedia page so we can truly understand how the neutrality of the article came to be.
No, Mr. Weinberger. We still want websites to aggregate fun stuff for us to look at, we still want career counselors to help us write a resume tailored to us, we still want a librarian to point us to the professor who happens to have the same obscure interest in Latvian folklore that you do, we still want accountants to understand our taxes better than we can, we still want astronomers to discover that black hole that will eat us up, and Wikipedia was still mostly written by a few hundred people.
Information that is not top down does not mean that we can’t still trust someone’s thoughts on a particular subject because that person has accumulated and read enough to “swim in the complex.” By pronouncing information set free of all former constraint, Weinberger has limited us.
