Shelley Burningbird Powers both disagrees with what I say and doesn’t much care for how I say it in Everything Is Miscellaneous. I appreciate Shelley’s care and thought. She does exactly what an author hopes reviewers will do — engage with the ideas — although of course I’d rather that she loved every comma and period in it. But, I didn’t ask the publishers to send her a copy thinking that she was likely to agree with it.
There are portions where I shake my head because she states as a disagreement with me precisely what I in fact was trying to say….which means I failed to communicate, i.e., wrote badly. For example, she says that as “any computer person would know immediately,” the way bits are arrayed on platters isn’t chaotic and messy, but rather is due to a “carefully constructed application consisting of programming algorithms and data model…” I actually do know that. But my point was: “The gap between how we access information and how the computer accesses it is at the heart of the revolution in knowledge. Because computers store information in ways that have nothing to do with how we want it presented to us, we are freed from having to organize the original information the way we eventually want to get at it.” I didn’t intend to imply that computers arrange bits chaotically or messily from the computer’s point of view, so to speak.
Shelley points out that while I use Flickr clustering as an example of order emerging bottom up from bits of meaning created for some other purpose, people now sometimes tag in order to get their photos into a cluster. Good point, but it actually only further makes my overall case that the chaos some predicted would result from free tagging in fact is not occurring (or at least not occurring to the degree feared).
Some of Shelley’s criticisms I certainly accept as accurate. I am indeed sloppy about the distinction between metadata and data. Sometimes that was slightly intentional — I sort of knew I was doing it — but I thought honoring the distinction would be confusing to less computer-literate readers than Shelley. Sometimes it wasn’t intentional; I’m just wrong. And overall my point in the book is that digitizing information erases all but the operational difference between data and metadata: Metadata now is what we know and data is what we’re looking for.
But when Shelley says she’s “flummoxed” by my referring to the spaces between words as metadata, I am flummoxed by her being flummoxed — a classic sign of a disconnect (a space between our words?). Spaces between words were introduced rather late in the literary day, and they seem to me to be as clearly metadata as are parentheses. They are data used to delimit data. Doesn’t that make them metadata? Where am I going wrong with that?
Some of the criticism I’d argue with, although the fact that it has arisen indicates that I’m at fault for not making myself clear. For example, Shelley says that I don’t provide examples of how Eleanor Rosch’s prototype theory applies to tagging systems. True, but that’s because I don’t think it applies directly. And I say so: “While prototypes are unlikely to become a dominant way of organizing Web materials, the fundamental property of prototype theory is already quite important in the digital order: The Web is full of sort-of, kind-of clustering based on multiple attributes, not based on Aristotlian definitions.” I then tie that to Joshua Schachter saying something can be “73 percent in a category.” (p. 196)
Shelley is absolutely right that I cover the Semantic Web too quickly. Initially, I planned on spending more time on it. But, I don’t think it’s at the heart of the change I think we’re going through. I may, of course, be wrong, but the section in the book tries to explain why I think that. While Shelley is correct that I am a skeptic about large-scale Semantic Web projects, I think my overall presentation is fairly balanced. But, then, I would think that. What it comes down to is the fact that Shelley and I disagree.
As for what Shelley says was the process by whch I developed the book — “David had a concept, a belief, and then sought out specific knowledge and other witnesses to the faith who would provide the evidence to support such” — there is an element of truth to that as well, but less than Shelley thinks. Everything Is Miscellaneous is an argument. In once sense, it’s an argument with Aristotle, although that’s not what we put on the jacket cover. In another and more important sense, it’s an argument against the idea that there is a best way to organize ideas. My task in the book is to surface our assumption that there is a best way, to show that it actually has a history (and isn’t itself “natural”), and then to point out the ways in which digital technology doesn’t fit with that old idea. Finally — the second half of the book, actually — tries to show how overturning that old belief affects business, science, politics, education, etc. As an argument, there is a polemical side to the book. But, I did try to be fair. And if Shelley could have seen what I believed when I first started working on this book three years ago, she would be less likely to think that I went about listening only to people I agreed with. Three years ago, other than smelling a rat in the idea that there is a single best way to order ideas, I didn’t know who I agreed with.
So, thank you, Shelley, for the thoughtful review. It’s a lot more helpful than “Loved the book. Gotta go.” [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous shelley_powers burningbird]
