Deep Thinking

David Weinberger’s article on The New Is is worth reading again. For those of you who haven’t sampled and linked to it, here is a paragraph that might spark some interest:

“Until now, the structure of knowledge has mirrored the way we’ve structured the physical world: We take a pile – think of your laundry – and split it into lumps, and then split those lumps into further lumps, until we have piles that are not worth splitting any more. So, we create a library classification system such as the Dewey Decimal System, or a Periodic Table of the Elements, a Tree of Life, or a business organizational chart. But when we’re dividing up our laundry, we have to put our socks into one pile or another, but not both (the Law of Identity). Why should the same restriction hold when we’re dealing with ideas? Why can’t ideas go in many piles? Why can’t a single intellectual leaf hang from many branches?”

If you haven’t explored the ideas on tagging, this may be the introduction to the reason for tagging. As a librarian I look at this in much the same way I viewed keyword searching in the 1980’s when I put my hands on my first cd-rom: Dissertations Abstract on CD. As a graduate assistant helping instructors with their book topics, searching DA in print was extremely time-consuming and often fruitless. When DA on CD arrived at the University of Iowa, I happened to see it and begged privileges to try it out. Fantastic! Keyword searching. Access through multiple points. I didn’t have to remember the esoteric, confusing ,often whimsical and capricious terms cataloguers chose (which were often incorrect, too, because they hadn’t read the documents). Instead I could attempt multiple search strategies to hit many documents. The next month Eric on CD arrived. Access to the world was coming. For those who were raised in the era of the internet, try to picture the dark ages of searching texts using those millions of cards in the card catalog at UI. Filing catalog cards was ALWAYS backed up and my access was never perfect.

Now, view the internet in a different light. The term Web 2.0 is bandied about frequently. I see it as just another arbitrary division in our search for ultimate access. We are no longer on a continuum of perfection but face branches of access that link back, cross over, and grow in their own direction. Back to Weinberger’s article we read “On the Net, documents – pages – get their value to a large degree not from what they contain but from what they point to. ”

So, I ask you to explore the article and add to the internet’s connectivity by posting in this blog and in your own. Add your ideas and personal expression to the internet. Someone else will come along and tag you. Maybe you will agree. Maybe you won’t. How will you view this? Will I be rememberd as a gatekeeper to knowledge or a guide along the road to wisdom? Hmmm. Something to think about.