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Everything is MiscellaneousBy David WeinbergerBook notes compiled by Jane L. SigfordPrologueInformation in SpaceIn the past our world has been defined by use of physical space which has limitations:In some physical space some things are nearer than othersPhysical objects can be in only one spot at any one timePhysical space is shared, so there can be only one layout, even though we all have different needs.Human physical abilities are limitedOrganization of any store needs to be orderly and neat. Let’s talk about an alternative world—the digital world: Instead of atoms that take up room, it’s made of bits.Instead of making us walk long aisles, in the digital world everything is only a few clicks away.Instead of having to be the same way for all people, it can instantly rearrange itself for each person and each person’s current task.Instead of items being placed in one area of a store, they can be classified in every different category in which users might conceivably expect to find them.Physical space has guided and limited how we organize knowledge.Suppose that now, for the first time in history, we can arrange things without the limitations of physical. Knowledge is freed from physical constraints; information doesn’t just want to be free. It wants to be miscellaneous. P, 7Chapter 1The New Order of OrderiTunes example of how we can take full advantage of organizing the worldEverything has its places Because we are organized now by bits, not physical space, the solution to the overabundance of information is more information. P. 13In digital world, restrictions of space don’t hold. Items can get assigned to multiple places simultaneouslyYours, Mine, and OursEvery day, more books come into the library than the 6,487 volumes Thomas Jefferson donated in 1815 to kick-start the collection after the British burned the place down. At Library of Congress books can be assigned up to ten different subject headings because of limitations of the organizational system and physical space.Library of Congress—deals with seven thousand new books a day. Yet seven million pages are added to the Web every day according to The Washington Post. –26times the number of books in the Library’s entire book collectionThe Library of congress’s processes for ordering information simply won’t work in new world of digital information. There is too much information moving too rapidly and there are no centralized classification experts in charge of the new digital world we’re rapidly creating for ourselves, starting with World Wide Web but including every connected corporate library, data repository, and media playerThree Orders of OrderFirst Order of Things: we organize things themselves e.g. silverware goes into drawers, books go on shelves.Second Order of Things:sorts by characteristics of things; defining by attributes what it is and what it is not e.g. using a card catalog to sort by category. Sorts by metadata because it’s information about information. Implicit authority about who deems the information worthy of being published on paper.Issue with both first and second order sorting—they arrange atoms. There are laws about how atoms work. They take up room, can only be in one place at a time, for example.3. Third order: Organized by bits.a. changing way we organize informationb. taking away authority of who controls and weights the informationChapter 2Alphabetization and its discontentsAlphabetization—unnatural and arbitrary. The alphabet itself has been a source of controversy for centuries. Whose alphabet? Which letters to include, or not? Which language?Natural OrderMortimer Adler tried to alphabetize wholeheartedly and organize information by deciding what would go in to Encyclopedia Britannica And what are the Great Books that all should study. It is one man’s vision of knowledge.The task and discipline are imposed by physical limitations of paper.BUT in 3rd order of order, ideas come unglued. Scholars shelve books differently, not just according to Adler. And in digital order, shelvings are provisional. Alphabetical order is not enough.Joints of natureSome items have “joints” or natural separations such as the joints in a turkey are logical places to cut it apart.We try to apply a “natural” order to things that are arbitrary and not natural, such as the DSM, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. If doctors treat, prescribe drugs, and insurance reimburses, there needs to be a classification in the DSM. However, to understand how arbitrary this is one can look at the historical classification of being homosexual. In 1952 it was a “sociopathic personality disturbance.” Several iterations occurred until the latest edition when homosexuality is not mentioned at all.Knowledge is what happens when the joints of our ideas are the same as the joints of nature. Order of HeavenWe believe there is an order to nature—that there are no “missing links” in the evolution of species from God to angels to humans to mammals to birds to insects to clams to plants to minerals to pure nothingness. Everything has its place. P. 35.Example: The definition of a planet has undergone discussions. By some definitions we would have 20 or more but someone said to “think of the children trying to memorize that.” So they changed the definition and took Pluto off in the meantime. Points out that trying to classify by attributes, such as size, circling the sun, etc. is up for discussion. The 2nd order of things is not the only way to classify.Race is another topic. One can pick out a set of properties, such as skin color, but that really makes no more biological difference than eye color, hair color, or being right- and left-handed. P. 39 How we classify our world reflects not only the world but also our interests, our passions, our needs, our dreams. P. 40Chemical SolitaireMendeleev, classified the elements of the world. The Periodic Table has an order which appears to be the opposite of alphabetization because it adds no information to the items it arranges. This ordering has also gone through the discussion—do we classify by atomic weight or atomic number? Atomic number one. Because of some 2nd order media, such as paper, we’ve had to pick some orderings over others, a limit the third order removes. Now we know that not everything has its place. Everything has its places—the joints at which we choose to bend nature. P. 45.Geography of KnowledgeDewey in creating his system of classifying books thought that the physical layout of libraries should reflect the basic structure of knowledge. He developed 9 major divisions. Yet many librarians say how out of date and provincial the system is. E.g. Christianity has a lot more numbers than Islam. Buddhism is way down the hierarchy.Dewey’s WorldDewey wanted to democratize libraries. He thought there should be a single, universal way of cataloging books that all libraries could use. P. 50Developed numbering system instead of simply alphabetizing books and putting them on shelves by size. He decided to arrange books by subject (2nd order thinking)Then he’d put them in order based on the relationships among them.He decided to use decimals to define the relationships. By using decimals he could stretch the subject area beyond limit. Numbering systems imply a hierarchy. P. 54 There is inherent importance in being a top-level category and not to the right of the decimal point. Problem with system: had to had 000 to encompass computer science because that was not an area of information when Dewey developed his system. The Dewey decimal system remains weirdly out of date, “reflecting the small-town sensibility of a student at a tiny Christian college in the mid-1870s. p. 55Yet librarians around the world work to reclassify in light of new awareness e.g. changing wording of “children born out of wedlock” to “children of unmarried parents.” Dewey Decimal classification because knowledge is unfixed. Knowledge is diverse, changing, imbued with the cultural values of the moment. World is too diverse for any single classification system to work for everyone in every culture at every time. P. 57 [Underlining mine]Carnival doesn’t care about Dewey Decimal or the precision and orderliness of its system. It uses “collaborative filtering”—by using filtering of what people buy and what other books people buy who buy a certain book . Therefore, they gather this metadata and recommend books to you. Amazon likes “friendly disorder, stuffing its pages with alternative ways of browsing and offbeat offers peculiar to each person’s behavior. P. 61. Amazon==3rd order improvement. Overturns all 3 of Dewey’s big ideasThere is no one single universal system to catalog books. Amazon has unique organization for each user.Amazon doesn’t arrange solely by subject—for each visitor they may have unique interests and links,Dewey wanted to map knowledge; Amazon wants to sell books. P. 62Amazon able to treat its collection as a miscellaneous pile that can be sorted digitally to reflect individual interests of each visitorIn 2nd order, the bigger a miscellaneous pile grows, the harder it gets to use. In 3rd order, piles offer exponentially more possibilities and more value the larger they get as long as you keep them well and truly miscellaneous. Problem with Dewey—he assumed knowledge had geography, a top-down view, a shape.—This makes sense in 1st an 2nd order of ordersIt unnecessarily inhibits the useful miscellaneousness of the 3rd. p. 63.Chapter 4Lumps and SplitsSecret Life of ListsA list is most basic way to order ideas. A list is a list of something.Nesting is putting items under headings e.g. hardware has nails, screws, etc. underneath it.Nests in TreesUsing nests uses the primitive form of lumping and splitting.Putting things under general headings = lumpingItemizing under general headings= splitting.We develop “trees” of classifying by having a “lump” and then drawing subheadings and relationships of branches and leaves underneath = splitting. Laundry and LinnaeusCarolus Linnaeus—fascinated with botany. Developed “trees” of classification and named by looking at attributes and sorting what items had and didn’t have. A binomial system. Developed naming system using genus and species. He too like Dewey wanted to democratize knowledge.He used the criterion of complexity to organize, starting with simple and going to complex.However, complexity itself is complex notion. Are cats more complex than worms, e.g.?His system used atoms to think through the order of natural world.Trees Without PaperSo what would a nested order look like without paper? P. 787Orgs are now used faceted classification system that constructs a dynamically browsable, branching tree that exactly meets your needs. NASA, IBM, Barnes and Noble are implementing such systemsFaceted classification combines user-friendliness of browsing a tree with the power of digital computing. It is unthinkable without computers.No one facet has to be the “root”. One doesn’t have to decide the root ahead of time because the “tree” can be built as you go depending on the facet most relevant to current interest, and then limit it by using another facet etc. Can be used on the fly or constructed a head of time which imitates the real world—Reality is multifaceted. How we choose to slice it up depends on why we’re slicing it up We have to give up Aristotelian belief that there is only one right and true tree of knowledge.Now that we have 3rd order (eliminating confines of paper) we can hang a “leaf” on many branches of a tree. It’s not that our knowledge of the world is taking some shape other than a tree or becoming some impossible-to-e vision four-dimensional tree. In the 3rd order of order, knowledge doesn’t have a shape. There are just too many useful, powerful, and beautiful ways to make sense of our world. P. 83Chapter 5The Laws of the JungleBig Can of WormsThings being miscellaneous causes many problems for people? Why? Because at its heart, the miscellaneous is a set of things that have nothing in common. Of course, that “nothing” is relative. Even Stephen Jay Gould pointed out a taxonomic system divides a domain into two major lumps that are wildly uneven, e.g. vertebrates v. invertebrates. P. 87Lamarck even realized that life cannot be order into a single line, from least complex to most as Linnaeus had done. Order often hides more than it reveal. Physical limitations on how we have organized information have not only limited our vision, they have also given people who control the org. of info more power than those who create the info.Editors are more powerful than reporters, and communication syndicates are more powerful than editors because they get to decide what to bring to the surface and what to ignore. [Education is really powerful because they decide what is “standard” and what students have to know. Such decisions are class and race-biased. Schools are truly 1st and 2nd order. What would happen if education truly became 3rd order? NOTE MINE]At least in the first and second orders of ord. In the 3rd order, bits rule. And so does the miscellaneous. P. 89Tagging LeavesThe “leaves” on trees of information are ways to sort but when we draw a map of knowledge, it is all too easy to assume that knowledge is a territory that can be subjugated by applying a rigorous and relentless methodology. P. 91Classification is a power struggle—it is political—because the first two orders of order require that there be a winner. P. 91The 3rd order takes the territory subjugated by classification and liberates it. Instead of forcing it into categories, it tags it. Tagging lets a user of online resources add a word or two to them so she can find them later. a way to cluster and tag areas and get back to them.Tagging grew out of personal need and is way to organize. P. 93On Delicious the lists also can be public so information can create tag streams—areas of interest common to people. One can also create a tag feed so a daily list of new pages is automatically sent to your email in-box or software—called an “aggregator.” P. 95In 3rd order of order the messiness of miscellaneous information doesn’t reduce its utility. Tagging is one way of the miscellaneous coming into its own. Another way is the way that online music sites aggregate the world’s music and let us access it in any order we want. P. 95Miscellaneous from A to ZBecause we are no longer tied to physical paper, we can organize information any way we want. New Properties, New strategies, new KnowledgeMiscellaneous doesn’t much resemble our traditional view of knowledge which we believe has 4 characteristics:There is only one reality, one knowledge same for all.We’ve assumed reality is not ambiguous, neither is knowledgeKnowledge is as big as reality and therefore no one person can comprehend it. Experts can only be expert in one field and they act as filters, using their education, experience, and expertise to keep bad information away from us.Experts achieve their position by working their way up through social institutions. However which groups get funded can determine what a society believes and the funding is often granted by people who know less than the experts [NCLB e.g. NOTE MINE]The way we have organized knowledge has been largely determined by these 4 properties of knowledgeHowever, 3rd order miscellany is digital, not physical, and we no longer have to agree on a single framework. Things have their places, not a single place. [Huge ramifications here for education when we continue to use a 1st order structure, and 2nd order idea of curriculum. NOTE MINE]4 new strategic principles are emerging:Filter on the way out, not on the way in—filtering on way in decreases value of abundance by ruling out items that may be of value to a few people. Filtering on way out—increases value of abundance by locating what is important to a given group at a given time. P. 103Put each leaf on as many branches as possible: Real advantage in 3rd order of miscellany.Everything is metadata and everything can be a label. In 1st 2 orders we had to think carefully about which metadata we made available. In 3rder every word in a book can count as metadata so can any of the sources that link to the book—Vastly increases leverage of knowledge.Give up control—So powerful to let users mix it up for themselves. Users are now in charge of the org of the info they browse. [HUGE ramifications for schools. What if we let students determine their path of learning? What if they were so engaged that they built their own framework? NOTE MINE]Control has changed hands. New rules of the information jungle are in effect, transforming the landscape in which we work, buy, learn, vote, and play. [Yet we still try to control content and system in schools. NOTE MINE]Chapter 6Smart LeavesValue of PointingUPC codes have 3 parts: manufacturer identifier, product identifier, and digit calculated from other digits to serve as check on integrity of number UPCs are success story and now we are heading to RFIDs (Radio Frequency Identification tags) to keep track of what people buy, use, etc. so businesses can market more effectivelyYet intellectual content not as easy to pin down—Treating a program e.g. as a smart leaf on the tree doesn’t automatically enable the elements of a program to be treated as smart leave.Essence of the MatterWe have believed in essentialism that everything is defined by clear and knowable traits that make it into what it is. Linnaeus began with his standard Christian belief (heavily influenced by Aristotle) that God populated Eden with the various species, each then exactly as it is now. P. 116When we look at cures for disease, we think there is an essential nature that can be discovered but we are learning that it is more complex. There is no one cure for the common cold. And cancer is a multiple of different kinds of cells—there is no ONE cancer, and no ONE cause or treatment.Essentialism makes the world seem more manageable, but it can lead us to miss what’s really going on. P. 118What is a book?Card catalogue is 2nd order object so people have to make decisions.Digital world, on the other hand, has never met a piece of information it didn’t like. ISBNs are now on every book published since 1960s to identify every book sold. Basically, There are a lot of permutations on what is a book. What is Hamlet e.g.? A play? A name? 3rd order thinking doesn’t let us become strict constructionists who recognize only a narrow range of essentials. Leaves are unpredictable and open-ended Intertwingularity“People keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable, and sequential when they can’t everything is deeply intertwingled.” Ted Nelson in Everything, p. 125. Nelson is the person who coined the term hypertext. Everything is intertwingled, intertwingularity enables knowledge. And unique identifies enable intertwingularity—although there can be so many unique identifiers for the same thing and at various levels of abstraction that the identifiers are all a-twingle also. Unique identifiers don’t just provide a way to pull information together. They also allow information to be dispersed. P. 127We’re only going to get better at intertwingularity because this is how we’re going to make sense of the miscellany of ideas and information we’re creating for ourselves. P. 128Chapter 7Social —a “user driven social content website. —TailRank lets you narrow down results from feeds, tags and buddies.Social networks create 3rd order front pages unique to a group’s interests.Conundrum of controlAuthorities have long filtered and organized information for us, protecting us from what isn’t worth our time and helping us find what we need to give our beliefs a sturdy foundation. But with the miscellaneous, it’s all available to us, unfiltered. P. 132.Businesses too have tried to own their information and the organization of that information. Not true any long.Customers, patrons, users and citizen are not waiting for permission to take control of finding and organizing info. We’re not doing it just as individuals. Knowledge—its content and its organization—is becoming a social act. P. 133[What does this mean to schools? NOTE MINE]Anonymous AuthorsMiscellany of info endangers some of our most well-established institutions, especially those that get their authority directly from their grip on knowledge. [E-12 and universities???? NOTE MINE]Wikipedia an example of how anonymous authors help shape info. The more an article is edited, the more it is being defined. A collection of authors can precipitate knowledge. P. 139Authority and TruthWikipedia only progresses by being up-front about errors and omissions. It Socratically revels in being corrected.Fixing an error in 2nd order publications is a much bigger deal because it requires starting up an editorial processes, printing presses, and delivery vans.However, 3rd order like Wikipedia can be corrected with seconds of someone noticing. Wikipedia does everything in its power to avoid being an authority yet that seems only to increase its authority—a paradox that indicates an important change in the nature of authority itself.In a miscellaneous world, an Oz-like authority that speaks in a single voice with unshakable confidence is a blowhard. Authority now comes from enabling us inescapably fallible creatures to explore the differences among us, together.Social KnowersSocial knowing changes who does the knowing and how more than it changes the what of knowledge.NCLB and state testing has in fact defined knowing as something done by individuals. It is something that happens inside your brain. The mark of knowing is being able to fill in a paper with the right answers. Knowledge could not get any less social. In fact, in those circumstances when knowledge is social we call it cheating. [This is in exact opposite of how the world is functioning. When are schools going to transform? NOTE MINE]If our children are doing their homework socially, even though they’re being graded and tested as if they’re doing their work in isolation booths. In the digital order their approach of social learning is appropriate. Memorizing facts is often now a skill more relevant to quiz shows than to life. [Memorizing relevant to state tests too. NOTE MINE]One thing is more sure: When our kids become teachers, they’re not going to be administering tests to students sitting in a neat grid of separated desks with the shades drawn. [!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! NOTE MINE]A lesson from Wikipedia—conversation improves expertise by exposing weaknesses, introducing new viewpoints, and pushing ideas into accessible form. Diverse viewpoints help us get past the biases of individualsNow we can see for ourselves that knowledge isn’t in our heads: It is between us. It emerges from public and social thought and it stays there, because social knowing, like the global conversations that give rise to it, is never finished. P. 147Chapter 8What Nothing SaysWe are surprisingly good readers of metadata. We can read metadata before we learn to read—we can spot ads from articles in supermarket tabloids very easily.Mining the CloudsIn 2nd order world—direct mail “junk mail” is often considered successful if 2% of recipients ac t on the offer. Getting response rates even that high usually requires buying mailing lists carefully sorted by zip code and the recipients’ history of purchases. P. 163In 3rd order amount of implicit information people generate about themselves is staggering. The line is blurry because we re in transition in our idea of privacy and we are still discovering ways to make sense of the implicit traces people leave behind. But there is a line, and businesses who want customers to come back will pay close attention to it.What isn’t SaidArt of tagging still being created. E.g. SF can be San Francisco, CA or a different puter can learn from sets of tags that people apply to pages. If someone tags sf and also tags “golden gate” chances are that it is SF California.Our computers learn more about who we are, where we live, and whom we know. Intersect a tagging system with an online social network, and much of the text that tags ignore can be brought back in. They also pay attention to which sites we visit and how much time we spend on each site. Span of MeaningWe are building this connected miscellany link-by-link and tag-by-tag. Its value is in the implicit relationships that turn it into an infrastructure of meaning. From it we can and do mine knowledge. By tagging and sites we visit we are creating streams of information =, explanation, speculation—shared every day with other researchers across multiple departments and perhaps even multiple companies. Chapter 9Messiness as a VirtueMedical records good example of orders of information. 2nd order is encoding patient files e.g. by name. By nature it’s a mare’s nest of info.We think things are supposed to be anizing things neatly in the first two orders requires us to make decisions about what is important. In first order, we have tot pick one way of arranging objects and that one way will not suit every user and every need.2nd order—allows us to add few alternate ways of organizing info (by subject and title as well as by author, for example) 3rd order is a mess from the beginning.Good example of 3rd order is what happens with Flickr and photos. Photos can be sorted by many different ways and it is not linear. Neatness has also been a characteristic of our systems of knowledge. Dewey reduced the knowledge in the world books to ten categories, each divided by ten and then into ten again. In such systems, exceptions are regrettableA neat environment gives us a sense of masterWe also seem to abhor complexity. Innovation seems to happen at intersections of interactions.The messiness of a diagram of social interaction is often a measure of the level of innovation in a company. [What does this say about schools? NOTE MINE]Simplicity was the only reasonable strategy before we developed machines that can handle massive amounts of data and metadata. Smart business is no longer confined to knowing what can be written in two-dimensional lines of the flat surface of a sheet of paper. P. 182Escaping Definition.Not all categories have clear-cut boundaries. Rosch in Everything, p. 187. Semantic MessArtificial intelligence has never lived up to its promise is that as soon as an AI application succeeds, it not longer looks like AI. A seamless whole that drives out ambiguity would also drive out the richness of implicit meaning. A leaf can hang from many branches. Our task becomes less to discover the one thing that something is than to see what if sort-of, kind-of, 73% is. The task of knowing is no longer to see the simple. It is to swim in the complex. P. 198Chapter 10The Work of KnowledgeEverything touching knowledge and everything knowledge touches is being transformed. Traditional knowledge, like a lighthouse as the see recedes and as radar supplements static maps, is changing simply by staying the same. Is knowledge being fragmented? Are we being fragmented along with it?The miscellaneous is unowned. Anyone can add to it. Anyone can slice it up and reorganize it the way she likes. Freed of paper, our knowledge can now be presented, communicated, and preserved in ways rich with links and exceptions. Does knowledge stay simple and orderly? [No, but don’t schools try to keep it that way? NOTE MINE]In the miscellanized world, knowledge is at most one click away from everything else that is not knowledge. Often they share the same page. Does knowledge retain its privileged position?Finally, can we re-ask the topic we began with: If everything is miscellaneous, why doesn’t it stay that way?Shard KnowledgePeople finding like mines and reading and sharing this info is that “many people are mostly hearing more and louder echoes of their own voices.” Worse, this fragmentation is causing groups—shards—to become more extreme and more polarized in their views. P. 201The Net has repeated the basic structure of the broadcast medium: a few speakers with lots of listeners. Conversation on the net always occurs on a ground of agreement. People of like mind find each other; they don’t broaden their horizons. They narrow them.Understanding, not knowledge, is what we’re aiming at in most conversations. Therefore, we seek those who think like we do. P. 201Even in authoritative sources such as Encyclopedia Britannica, knowledge is not homogeneously authoritative. Knowledge unchainedGenius is topical It therefore has to be proved anew in every domain. What happens if topics crumble, if knowledge doesn’t divide into stable, mappable fields? What then will experts master? If masters no longer have a territory, what are they masters of? P. 206Print forces editors to make unnatural decisions. It layers symbolism onto the length of topics. P. 207In Wikipedia length is a manifestation of interest and passion, even if the interest and passion of only a single plexified KnowledgeScience, despite its complexity, is also in search of the simple.Politicians will continue to sum up complex ideas in simple phrases. Curricula may now be aimed at the test-taking requirements of NCLB but classroom teachers know that their job is always to keep their students from thinking issues are too simple.Classroom blogs are a place for students to be complex and think together. P. 211Digital order—have potential for connections from the trivial to the urgent which is characteristic of new miscellany.Because we are doing this willy-nilly and sometimes without even intending to, we are blurring lines faster than we draw them. We use to have a box of 8 crayons now we make our own colors. P. 213Place of KnowledgeIf we are defined as the animals that are rational, then knowing is the highest human activity and knowledge is king. But the 3rd order of order doesn’t have a lot of patience with monarchs who tell us how we shall organize our ideas.What’s happening to the knowledge we already know? What’s happening to how we develop knowledge? What will be knowledge’s role in the externalized web of meaning we’re spinning? P 213Knowledge we knowTextbooks present settled knowledge. But the Internet makes knowledge as instantly available as a calculator’s “equals” button.There’s always going to be plenty to discover and argue about.Understanding is metaknowledge but some knowledge will be commoditizedCommoditization of knowledge enables greater value to be built from it. Now more than ever, knowledge’s value will come from the understanding it enables.Developing KnowledgeIn the 3rd order what starts out as open, authority-free, and permissionless can find itself evolving in unexpected ways.Various media may add ranking and comments. Such as In miscellaneous world, knowledge comes in gradations and varieties. Some knowledge is good enough to pass the most rigorous of peer reviews and make it into the pages of a prestigious journal. Some knowledge is unpublished but worth reading and discussing. Some is true and some is not rue yet. P. 218Niches in this new ecology are distinguished by their metadata.Knowledge was supposed to be a mirror of reality—either true or not. But that isn’t true any more. P. 219Knowledge, Essence, and MeaningTwo most common words in English language = the and of. "The" is a word of separation and “of” is a word of connection. First job of knowledge was to discern defining criteria.Essentialism, taken at its simples, says that each thing has a set of attributes that defines it, as well as less important attributes that come along. Perfect example of how that doesn’t work is the case of race. E.g. Tiger Woods. What race is he?As of 1997 American Anthropological Association says that race “has no scientific justification in human biology” that there is more difference within a racial group than between groups. Essentialism fails. Construction of meaning is the most important project of the next hundred years. [In that case, what is the job of schools? NOTE MINE]In the world after the Enlightenment, the cultural task was to build knowledge. In the miscellaneous world, the task is to build meaning, even though we can’t yet know what we’ll do with this new domain. Knowledge’s new place will be in an ever-present mesh of social meaning.Knowledge is thus not being dethronedBut knowledge is now not our only project or our single highest calling.Making sense of what we know is the broader task, a task for understanding within the infrastructure of meaning.MetabusinesGoing meta does understandably scare many traditional industries. The miscellanizing of information means that information is plucked from the tree of its birth and is available to anyone who can make use of it. P. 227[In this case, how do schools act? NOTE MINE]Why isn’t everything MiscellaneousWe have built institutions that depend on maintaining systems of categorization for their authority and revenues. [Schools and universities NOTE MINE]With the rise of the 3rd order, we can ask question again. Why isn’t everything miscellaneous? Freed of paper, we will continue our long march of knowledge But in the 3rd order, we turn an item over in our hands, trying to remember what it reminds us of. We make a note. The note is a public link that exists in the world and can be discovered and reused. The result is a startling change in our culture’s belief that truth means accuracy, effectiveness requires adherence to clear lines of command and control, and knowledge is power. P. 229It’s not who is right and who is wrong. It’s how different pints of view are negotiated, given context, and embodied with passion and interest.It’s how messily you are connected and how thick with meaning are the linksIt’s not what you know, and it’s not even who you know. It’s how much knowledge you give away. Hoarding knowledge diminishes your power because it diminishes your presence.A topic is not a domain with edges. It is how passion focuses itself.The world won’t every stay miscellaneous because we are together making it ours. CodaIn the 3rd order, all the ways of organizing a collection can be made public.We can change the visible order to reflect our private meaning. We can share orderings and build on them.Each enhances the meaning of the wholeNone has to be given priority.None is more real than another. ................
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