Or vice versa?
A
review of David Weinberger's Everything
is Miscellaneous in the online edition of Forbes cuts to the quick right from
the title of the review:
Chaos Is The New World Order
Personally, I don't find such a statement threatening, but I can well understand
that some people might. It's also a roundabout way of perhaps solving the problem
- we don't have to create order, because chaos is all the order we need, and it
seems to come so naturally.
Bruce Sterling, writing two and a half years ago in
Wired referred to taxonomy as:
the traditional way to impose structure on the blooming
confusion of raw reality.
In other words, we may be imposing structure, but it's
only an edifice that hides the confusion beneath it. Sterling's article is a discussion
of tagging that, back then, was still considered relatively novel. He contrasts
the traditional taxonomy to the new folksonomy and declares that:
A folksonomy is nearly useless for searching out specific, accurate information
but he concludes that same sentence with:
but that's beside the point.
It may well be that everything is beside the point, or perhaps that there isn't
even any point at all.
Go to: Please organize me.