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Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Weinberger talks about Everything is Miscellaneous

David Weinberger is conducting a public interview on the WELL's Inkwell conference about his new book Everything is Miscellaneous. I was really excited by this book, which explains how the Internet is exposing and undermining the arbitrary categories we use for knowledge, social organization, and employment.

First, in the philosophical portion of my "career," I reacted viscerally against the dominant schools of thought that assumed the aim of philosophy is to be clear and distinct. Analysis of course has its place, but it has always seemed obvious to me that most of what matters can't be said. So, when a Web form asks you to list your interests, you freeze. I do, anyway. Or if you ask me to describe my children, at the end I'll always be left with the feeling that I left out the most important parts. The power of language - as many have noted - is in what it doesn't say. (Ring one up on the Cliche-O-Meter!)
Second, in the late 1980's and early 1990's, I survived the SGML wars. SGML would enable complex document sets to be created, maintained, retrieved, and reused far more easily. But, industries couldn't agree on the details of which metadata to capture, and lots writers saw the creation of metadata as red tape. Explicit metadata sucks. Usually. (Cory Doctorow made these points in his enlightening and entertaining way in his MetaCrap article.)
So, I knew I wanted to write about metadata because it's crucial and maddening and elusive. On the other hand, who cares about metadata? What counts is the effect it's having on our institutions and their authority. So, at various times, the rubric of the book was the promise of the implicit, messiness as a virtue, social knowledge, and even (for about four minutes) the problem with Aristotle.

Link

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:31:44 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

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