Monday, June 18, 2007

Can't Wait to Read This Book

I have heard about this book by David Weinberger (his blog here) and I want to check it out -- Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. Interview w/ R.U. Sirius here. Excerpts:

You know, in a library, a physical book has to go on only one shelf under one category. That’s not a natural restriction; a single book is about many different things. But even when you try to make up for that restriction with the catalog card, which is a very reduced form of meta-data for the book, the size of the card is dictated by the inconvenience of atoms. The size of the card means that you can’t put in very many of those references. But on the web, everybody can put in his or her own references. We can have hundreds or millions of references and links and connections of meaning linked to a single resource. There’s no limit. So, in some ways, the web reflects better the complexity of the linked nature of the world...

...Taxonomies are power. With a centralized top-down taxonomy, one problem is that somebody gets to say what you are. And lots of people will inevitably disagree with the categorization. A really bad example of this is what happened to a popular musician living under apartheid in South Africa, By the time he was fifty, he had become a different race five times because the law had changed. And once, he had to leave his wife and family because of it. So taxonomy is power. It’s not always that gross. But let’s say you’re trying to decide where Scientology or Jews For Jesus or Baha’i goes in the category of religions. Are they at the same level as the big ones? Power resides in that decision. Now that we can create local clusters of meaning, local taxonomies, categorizations — a lot of that power dissipates. That’s a good thing.

Labels: , , , , , ,

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home