[T]he arrival of the Web and the tools by which we can so fluently create new ways of categorizing what we know make what philosophy has been struggling towards quite concrete and highly democratic...

I read David Weinberger's new book, Everything is Miscellaneous, and you should, too. I spoke with the good doctor recently, and one of the results is today's newspaper column, which you can read after the jump.

A philosopher for the digital age

by Edward Cone
News & Record
7-29-07

One of the surprising things about the Internet, right up there with the fact that the guy who posts pictures of cats with funny captions at icanhascheezburger.com makes enough money from the site that he quit his day job, is how natural it feels to use the Web. We've only been navigating this vast and ever-growing sea of information for a decade, but there's something intuitive about the way it links to itself and responds to our particular preferences and needs.

Now comes David Weinberger, a philosopher for the digital age, to say that our online experiences tell us something profound about the organization and categorization of information -- and not just on the Internet. In his new book, Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, Weinberger considers the Web through the lenses of philosophy, history and taxonomy. As it turns out, the Web may feel natural because it reflects truths about the order of the universe that have been misunderstood by previous generations back to the time of Aristotle.

This may not sound much like summer reading, but I read this book by the pool. Weinberger -- co-author of the influential marketing tome The Cluetrain Manifesto and author of an essential exploration of Web culture, Small Pieces Loosely Joined -- is a relaxed and highly accessible writer. He does come equipped with a doctorate in philosophy and a background in academia and the technology industry, but he also has worked as a gag writer for Woody Allen.

His basic arguments are, well, basic. In the physical world, we have to choose one way of organizing things. You can arrange your CD collection, for example, alphabetically by artist, or by genre or era, or you can just pile it up randomly, but you can only use one of those methods at a time. On the Web, though, you can order the same collection in as many different ways as you can imagine, and all of these lists can exist at the same time. This is big news for businesses that want to give customers as many ways as possible to find products, Weinberger told me during a recent interview -- not only can companies create multiple listings themselves, they can allow customers to create their own lists, any one of which might capture the attention of a potential buyer.

But the implications of this simultaneous ordering are much broader than improvements to electronic commerce or challenges to the Dewey Decimal System. Consider the recent debate over Pluto's status as a planet in our solar system. "We have inherited this idea that the universe is ordered one way and not in other ways, and that the job of science is to figure that out, but it gets in our way of understanding how the world works," says Weinberger. "We insist there are nine planets, but it turns out we've never had a definition of what a planet is -- the set of objects that are big and round and circling the Sun wouldn't be interesting at all if we didn't have myths and legends about them. It would be better to categorize them according to the interests of the person making the categories. If she's interested in objects that might support life, classify them by the presence of water. It's no better or worse than classifying them by having copper, or an atmosphere."

And that's the big notion: "There is not a single order of the universe, there are as many orders as we want," says Weinberger. "It's an unsettling idea," he acknowledges, because it flies in the face of the Western tradition back to the ancient Greeks, who made "the founding assumption that knowledge is possible only if the universe is essentially stable and organized the way knowledge is -- that there is a real way things are, and knowledge is the capturing of that real way, and if there weren't one real way, then everything would be confusion and chaos and knowledge wouldn't be possible. It's the very heart of philosophy's mission, this idea that the real world is organized in a rational, orderly and harmonious way. And Christianity adds to this the idea that it's God who set up the world that way. So knowing the universe takes on a religious importance."

Challenges to this world view have been under way for centuries. "It's not like the Web arrived and suddenly philosophy is overturned," Weinberger says. "Since the Enlightenment we've been struggling against those notions to one degree or another. The idea that there are multiple ways of categorizing, that categorization is based on our interests and not simply upon a read-out of how the world actually is, has been brought up repeatedly in the past generation by the post-modernists. But the arrival of the Web and the tools by which we can so fluently create new ways of categorizing what we know make what philosophy has been struggling towards quite concrete and highly democratic."

None of which means all of the old modes of ordering are now obsolete -- your alphabetized phone directory still works fine -- just that the universe is revealed as a richer place for our new ways of understanding it. And it seems to me that if God is in the details, then accepting a multiplicity of meaningful approaches to those details may be a step toward the deepest understanding of all.

© News & Record 2007

Edward Cone (www.edcone.com, efcone@mindspring.com) writes a column for the News & Record most Sundays.

Comments

[Jeffrey Sykes]

"But the arrival of the Web and the tools by which we can so fluently create new ways of categorizing what we know make what philosophy has been struggling towards quite concrete and highly democratic."

Ed:

Good column. I've read the second half of it three times and have a lot to say about it, but no time to do it right now.

However, I don't understand this quote. Could you give some more perspective on what he means. I don't understand how "concrete and highly democratic" fit together.

[Ed Cone]

Thanks, JS. I enjoyed the book and it was a fun column to write.

As I read it, "concrete" means real and not just theoretical -- rather than discussing taxonomy in the abstract, we're actually pointing and clicking and creating lists of our own, experiencing these different cuts at order at iTunes or Amazon or Google Maps.

"Democratic" means the new ordering potential is available to anyone with web access -- you don't need a Ph d in philosophy or library science or astronomy or whatever to create a meaningful taxonomy that others can then use.

[David Wharton]

I've been thinking about your column all morning, so thanks for writing the review. It sounds like an interesting book.

Your review reads like Weinberger swims into some pretty deep philosophical waters, but maybe they're waters that have been swum before?

I'm thinking specifically of old ideas of nominalism and wondering whether W. adds anything new to that way of thinking. (In the Wikipedia article, just substitute "category" for "universal" and you'll see where I'm going.)

I love the ad-hoc taxonomies we make every time we do a google search, but the only thing new about that is the ease with which software allows us to do it. And I don't see the logical sequence from saying "I can organize things in many ways" to "there are no natural kinds."

Is his idea that everything is miscellaneous a premise or a conclusion?

[David Weinberger]

Jeff, Ed answered your question the same way - except better - than I would have.

David, I don't claim to add anything at all to the debate over universals. Instead, I think I'm noticing how technology is making it clear that the ancient belief in essences and natural kinds -- which we still hold to in many aspects of our everyday metaphysics -- is insupportable.

I don't know how to answer your "premise or conclusion" question since the book isn't structured as an argument. For me personally, I came into the book as a Heideggerian , not a nominalist, interested in messy, social and cultural webs of significance, and not a believer in essences or natural kinds. The book tries to show the ways in which important aspects of our connective tech embodies the anti-natural-kinds point of view. (Nominalism is not the only alternative to a belief in natural kinds, of course.)

[David Wharton]

David, thanks for responding. That's the first time I've ever commented on a book review and got a response from the author!

Since my training is in classics, and I have a special interest in Aristotle and Plato, I tend toward some kind of realism as regards essences and natural kinds.

But I have a beach vacation coming up, and your book is going to be my seaside reading. I look forward to it.

[David Weinberger]

David, if your training is in classics, you're likely to get fed up with it pretty quickly. So bring a detective novel or two, too :)

I do look forward to your comments, if you do make it through the book. Or even part of the way through.