Misc.

In the spirit of miscellany, some random thoughts on Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger:

**  Obviously, the form of this work -- a printed, fixed-in-time-and-space, paper-constrained book with tidy chapters and subheadings and no messy hyperlinks -- seems pretty ridiculous and therefore provides the perfect commentary on a second-order world that is not completely ready for the "third order of order."  Weinberger's book did, however, manage to feel less outdated than Nakamura's (although today Facebook and MySpace would have made for more appropriate examples than Friendster and could have advanced his argument about the social nature of knowledge), partly because he much more frequently acknowledged that the state of the web in general and particular websites would likely be different by the time someone read his book.

**  As does the Slate article that Andrew linked to, I did wonder if the discussion of wikipedian (yes, it's an adjective) NPOV was a bit too utopian.  Is neutrality possible?  Is it preferable?  Do we define neutrality by the number of people participating in the conversation?  Even if millions participate, does this guarantee that the power, privilege, and hierarchies of our world won't be replicated in the ways knowledge is shaped in the third order?  What about group-think?  (Actually, I would suggest that collaborative websites are much less likely to succumb to group-think than in-person gatherings.)

**  The Slate article, written by Chris Wilson, makes frequent references to secrecy and hidden agendas.  He calls sites like Digg and Wikipedia "oligarchies" rather than democracies, and, like Nakamura and (to a much lesser extent) Weinberger, he says that the internet has not lived up to the "fairy tales of participatory culture of Web 2.0."  He ends by saying, "Digg and Wikipedia would do well to stop pretending they're operated by the many and start thinking of ways to rein in the power of the few."  Similarly, Weinberger lauds sites (like Wikipedia) that make the discussion part of knowledge- and meaning-making available to all viewers.  Even so, we would do well to remember how much goes on behind the scenes:  As many constraints as the digital third order removes, it still operates within certain boundaries and limitations, and there are still programmers and entrepreneurs and others pulling at least some of the strings.  Take this blog, for instance:  Because I have neither the expertise nor the time to design and program my own website (although I did take a C++ class about a hundred years ago), I am constrained by a very useful but very limiting template that shapes the way I write and present myself and my ideas to you; it is, therefore, shaping the way I make meaning and the way you make meaning of my meaning.

**  For those in this semester's "Rhetorics and Democracies" class, I was thinking about the "public sphere" throughout this book, related especially to questions of "democracy" (raised above), social structures, and collaborative meaning-making.  For those who were in last semester's "Feminist Rhetorical Theories" class, I heard some resonances between our readings last semester and Weinberger's discussions of "gaps" (e.g. "knowledge exists in the connections and in the gaps" [146]) and re-mapping (we can no longer rely on Aristotilian "trees" or other second-order "maps" of the world).

**  A side note about the massive amounts of stuff available on the web, the ease of finding much of this stuff, and how quickly it has become second (first? third?) nature to grab my laptop and search for something I want:  A few weeks ago when I was blogging about being watched by a Van Gogh painting, I wanted to find the poem I wrote about this experience when I was in college.  Even though it's safely tucked away on a piece of paper in a folder in a box somewhere and the only digital copy is on an old computer that wouldn't start up the last time I tried, my automatic reaction was to pull up Google.  This is MY poem, written 7 years ago, never published, never emailed, never uploaded, shared only with my professor and a few peers in a workshop...and yet, somewhere in my subconscious mind I was just sure that if I wanted it, I could find it on the internet.  (Thank goodness I can't, and neither can you or anyone else!)

**  Though I have some critiques and there were places I felt Weinberger could have theorized or problematized further, I really enjoyed reading this book.  Clearly, his audience is not (primarily) academics, and that was refreshing!