I atten­ded a wildly anim­ated, won­der­fully amus­ing and thought pro­vok­ing key­note talk by David Wein­ber­ger entitled ’The Busi­ness of the Mis­cel­laneous’ at the Annual Gen­eral Meet­ing of the CIRA this after­noon. Wein­ber­ger claims that soci­ety has solved the threat posed by inform­a­tion over­load by cre­at­ing more inform­a­tion. Addi­tion­ally, he claims, the blur­ring of the line between the metadata and the actual data has fur­ther eroded the author­ity of the tra­di­tional media and given a new­found cred­ib­il­ity to sources such as Wiki­pe­dia. A cred­ib­il­ity that he asserts that comes from trust built on trans­par­ency.
He began by look­ing at the orders of inform­a­tion, the first order being data, the second the metadata to describe and clas­sify the first and the third being the digit­iz­a­tion of this inform­a­tion and the agglom­er­a­tion of the data with the metadata. His explor­a­tion star­ted from an appre­ci­ation that the tra­di­tional print media, where edit­ors and pub­lish­ers decide the import­ance of inform­a­tion and impose their own clas­si­fic­a­tion sys­tem, has claimed own­er­ship of inform­a­tion. It has fur­ther assumed an author­ity (one that was poten­tially dan­ger­ous, and cer­tainly not sac­red) that was tough to chal­lenge in the print age. Wein­berg con­tends that the digit­iz­a­tion of inform­a­tion has allowed the user to retake own­er­ship of the data through searches that don’t dis­tin­guish between the first two orders and thus remove the imposed author­ity.
He exten­ded this to the boom­ing trend of user-augmented col­lect­ive inform­a­tion in a repos­it­ory such as Wiki­pe­dia. He asks, why it is that Wiki­pe­dia has the cred­ib­il­ity it has. Its not that the savvy user sees Wiki­pe­dia con­tent as abso­lutely true, but that by expos­ing the pro­cess of edit­ing and blatantly admit­ting its own fail­ings (through warn­ings on data flagged as inac­cur­ate, in need of sources, revi­sion or of a biased nature) it estab­lishes itself as one of us and being of us. Wiki­pe­dia gains cred­ib­il­ity in a time when other media are los­ing cred­ib­il­ity by being over pos­sess­ive or pro­tect­ive over inform­a­tion own­er­ship and fail­ing to adequately admit (or even almost revel as Wiki­pe­dia does) to their own fail­ings. It’s an inter­est­ing take on the col­lapse of tra­di­tional author­ity as expressed through the clas­si­fic­a­tion of know­ledge.
The second big thing he iden­ti­fies as a res­ult of the digit­iz­a­tion of inform­a­tion is that the qual­ity of inform­a­tion being exchanged in the pub­lic sphere is exper­i­en­cing a smart­ing up (as opposed to a dumb­ing down). As inform­a­tion can be eas­ily and read­ily shared, mashed up and com­men­ted upon, it has gained new per­spect­ives, and new con­text that allows us to ‘lux­uri­ate in mak­ing things com­plex again.”