Thursday, February 4, 2010

#4

Weinberger - so what?

I think the biggest point in Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous is about how Web 2.0 has increased our awareness to the importance of organization not only on the Internet, but also how it affects our daily lives. I think he also wants us to think about how understanding is much more important in today's world than knowledge.

I feel that Weinberger wants us to think about his three orders as sort of a past, present, and future. Order one represents "old" technologies, like typewriters and encyclopedias, for instance. These technologies got us to where we are today, but with newer and better resources and technology, we use them as a back up.

Order two represents where we are today. We index our photos through cataloging systems, or tags, be it in real life in photo albums, or on the web using services like Flickr. As a society, we are moving towards technologically advanced systems over "old school" ways like tangible photos in boxes that hide under our beds.

Finally, I believe that order three can represent both present and future. We see "web 2.0" slowly moving the Internet as we know it forward. Ten years ago, there were no blogs or tags, just our own "homepage" sites that we built using lame pre-formatted layouts from Geocities or AOL. Now we can create our own "homepages" in the form of blogs, twitter, and social networking sites. But I think by showing us multiple examples of present and past, Weinberger is showing us that eventually what we are using now will also be outdated.

1 comment:

  1. Your past, present, future connection is an interesting way of thinking about W's points. You make a lot of good points here, but I would've liked to have seen a bit more about some of the nuances of his main points (not just how the system is changing, but how society and the self are also changing along w/ it, particularly in terms of our understanding of knowledge and experts).

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