“Everything Is Miscellaneous” by David Weinberger
Written on July 17, 2007
Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder
“As we invent new principles of organization that make sense in a world of knowledge freed from physical constraints, information doesn’t just want to be free. It wants to be miscellaneous.” (p. 7)
Knowledge was supposed to be a mirror of reality. It thus was either true or not true, end of story. But if knowledge includes metadata about how much and why we should believe it… Knowledge can’t be a literal read-off of the real because we’re too deeply involved in the world we’re trying to know…. Our knowledge of the world is an understanding that simultaneously assesses the quality and reliability of our understanding. (p. 218-219)
In the world after the Enlightenment, the cultural task was to build knowledge. In the miscellaneous world, the task is to build meaning… Knowledge’s new place will be in an ever-present mesh of social meaning…. But 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. (p. 222)
useful summary by Mark Bower
Filed in: culture.
[…] The above passage from Love, Life, Goethe: Lessons of the Imagination from the Great German Poet resonated unexpectedly with ‘Everything Is Miscellaneous.’ […]