The Messy, Glorious Hairball of the Real World

I saw this blurb for a new book on BoingBoing, and it struck me as somehow relevant to our class. It seems to me that part of the reason so many instructors are wary of technological innovation may be tied to the anxiety of hierarchy. This book (from the blurb at least) seems to suggest that the internet is radically anti-hierarchical (definitely true), which would seem to put it at odds with the traditional structure of academia. Perhaps what we are experiencing when we deal with this anxiety is a kind of "betweenness" (to drop some Heidegger) -- a sense that we are historically between two epistemological frameworks. I think our era may be comparable to the Copernican and Einsteinian epistemological shifts. The internet is teaching us how to know the world differently. But we don't quite understand all that this "new knowing" entails yet. Thus, the anxiety. At least, that's my take. Here's the blurb:

David Weinberger's "Everything is Miscellaneous" is the kind of book that binds together innumerable miscellaneous threads and makes something new, coherent, and incontrovertible out of them. Weinberger's thesis is this: historically, we've divided the world into categories, topics, and hierarchies because physical objects need to be in one place or another, they can't be in all the places they might belong. Computers and the Internet turn this on its head: because a computer can "put things" in as many categories as they need to be in, because individuals can classify knowledge, tasks, and objects idiosyncratically, the hierarchy is revealed for what it always was, a convenient expedient masquerading as the True Shape of the Universe.

It's a powerful idea: from org charts to science, from music to retail theory, from government to education, every field of human endeavor is tinged with hierarchy, and every hierarchy is under assault from the Internet. One impact of this change is that it reveals the biases lurking underneath the editorial carvery of our systems. From the Dewey Decimal system's laughable clunkers (mentalist bunkum gets its own category, but Islam has to share a decimal with a couple competing "Eastern" faiths) to the Britannica's paring away at "old" biographies to make way for the new, Weinberger makes a compelling case for a new kind of knowledge that more faithfully represents the messy, glorious hairball of the real world.