One of the easiest ways to win my affection is to quote Borges. Thank you, David Weinberger.
The discussion of the “third order of order” was fascinating in a few ways for me. Most concretely, my 40 hour/week life as a book buyer was interested in the commentary on spatial layouts of retail and the effectiveness of dis/ordering the virtual spaces of Amazon.com to better serve some consumers. (Insert bias here.) I did feel that Weinberger’s (laudatory) analysis did not fully include the social consequences of the shift from atoms to bits/bytes. How are physical spaces/communities changed by the shift from brick-and-mortar, community-based shops to e-commerce? This seems to be a question that Weinberger (and a lot of business books, as this one is labeled) aren’t necessarily interested in fully considering.
My small rant against Amazon shouldn’t be considered a refutation of the principles that Weinberger praises. He does a consistently convincing job of laying out the argument for being excited over the potential of 3-O. Sites like del.icio.us, flickr, and wikipedia, to name a very few, offer many advantages over predecessors: improvements in accessibility and distribution (to some, anyway); a theoretically more-egalitarian, decentralized system of creating knowledge. As we’ve discussed, there are roadblocks to better realizing these great potentials. While tagging and duplicity and growth of metadata (and the interchangeability of data and metadata) offer improvements in opening up the structures of knowledge and power to more people (with access), how do these virtual spaces change the physical spaces that people continue to inhabit? What about the dangers of homogeneity of interface? Algorithms can free users to better find more information, but do superior algorithms lead users to a single site? Do book recommendations based on purchases reinforce patterns of commerce, rather than choices of preference? Does the widespread adoption of specific algorithms encourage less-popular data to get buried? These are some of the questions that Everything is Miscellaneous leads me to ask, which is one sign of a good text, in my criteria.
The discussion of categories and metadata also gets me thinking of issues of genre in literature. A few grad students in Plan C, myself included, had coffee yesterday morning with Peter Grandbois, one of the candidates for the new fiction hire in the creative writing program. One of the many reasons Peter impressed me was his interest in hybrid texts (combinations of poetry/fiction/nonfiction) as well as cross-genre work, such as magical realism. (Which is arguably its own genre, which is one solution to fixing problems of genre – make more genres. But what about “interstitial” fiction?) And visiting writer Pam Houston talked about her progressive disinterest in labels of fiction and nonfiction. This semester, I’m doing an independent reading centered on one iteration of this question/problem: the Author. One of the specific aspects I’m addressing is the Author appearing within the text and what that might say about authority and the line between fiction and nonfiction. Stay tuned, I guess…