ON THE INTERNET MESSINESS IS A VIRTUE

You say the internet is about dumbing-down; I say it's about connecting-up, writes Evgeny Morozov from the Picnic new-media festival in Amsterdam, where he has been listening to an information guru called David Weinberger ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

"Getting things organised" has traditionally meant putting them into boxes, keeping them apart. As in the physical world, two things can’t be at the same place at the same time. Any organisational chart is going to have a box somewhere labelled “misc.”, but we expect the successful organisation to minimise that box. The bigger it is, the worse the organising principle.

In the digital world, organisation works differently. It is the isolated thing which is useless. The more interconnections and ambiguities, the richer the content and meaning. The bigger you make the "misc.", the closer you get to the net, where you can post/read/write what you want. You end up with more of everything. More art, but also more porn. More love, but also more hate. More intelligent analysis but also more utter foolishness.

David Weinberger, a fellow at the Berkman Centre for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, and author of “Everything is Miscellaneous”, is defending this model of the internet at the Picnic festival in Amsterdam. (His debating partner is Andrew Keen, author of "The Cult of the Amateur", who sees the inclusiveness of the internet as a levelling-down, vulgarising force.)

Weinberger talks about three orders of organisation. The first is a traditional archive with data pigeonholed into folders and files. The second is a library, where the data gives rise to metadata, or information about the information: the card catalogue is valuable in itself.

A third order occurs in the digital world, where we are still finding our way. Weinberger suggests four guiding principles.

The first, he calls the “leaf on many branches”. Think of an online store such as Amazon, where a camera may be listed under "recording devices", "equipment", "gadgets", "electronics". The more places you can find it, the better.

The second principle, “messiness is a virtue”, refers to the cross-linking culture of the internet. Meaning emerges out of what appears to be a very messy world of connections between blogs, web-sites, social-networking profiles and what have you. “Each of those links adds value and enriches what you’ve written. In the online world, messiness is not a disaster, the way it is in real world”, says Weinberger.

The third principle is the convergence of meta-data and data. In the physical world, we don’t confuse the label and the object. Online, things are rather different. When you search for a book you can search by the name of the author (meta-data) or by the actual text of the book. There is little or no functional distinction between meta-data and data. If you know the one, you can get to the other. And to the extent that everything is meta-data, search gets much easier.

The fourth and the last principle is the “unowned order”. Offline, whoever owns stuff also owns the organisation of it. Online, it’s different. You only need access, not ownership, to organise.

Weinberger loads Delicious, the tagging site, and gives a brief introduction to how it works: "it feels really great to have the whole world do research for you”. But the point isn't only to find new and interesting information. You get to know and remember other people by their links. You discover they save pages similar to yours, you go to the other pages they save, you find out who they are, you follow their tags. “Eventually, you marry”, jokes Weinberger.

The underlying change, he says, is that we are moving away from the time when we thought that the best way to organise information was to get some experts together and have them decide for us what was relevant and what was not.

No need to abolish that approach--we still have experts who are amazingly good and professional about what they do and how they do it. "We can keep the good old ways, but we are also saying, let’s take those leaves off the tree and make a miscellaneous pile of stuff hoping that it would reveal connections between pieces”, says Weinberger. “Instead of excluding stuff, let’s include anything. When you as an editor make an assumption that a Paris Hilton article is trivia, you can include it anyway and let people decide. Who knows, in ten years there will surely be somebody writing a thesis about it, so include it!”.

Not only do you preserve the information, you let it go wherever it might be of use or interest: to aggregators, which can create new value for users by showing, for example, which airline is offering the best air-fare; to mash-ups which can discover and display correlations between seemingly unrelated data-sets.

Freedom of information leaves us free to reject, or to demand, complexity. And often we demand it. If George Bush gives a speech meant to get a point across simply, within hours thousands of bloggers will be picking it apart and re-introducing complexities that Bush sought to exclude, or never imagined. Bloggers have the human instinct, to find a topic of common interest and explore its complexities in conversation. But it's the opposite of the instinct of the broadcast media, which is to simplify. “That’s why we are so happy to be on the web, that’s why we like blogging--we get to be complex again”, says Weinberger.

Complexity is the work of many hands. Knowledge emerges from conversation, and “conversation drives bugs out of knowledge”, says Weinberger. “This is not just a Wikipedia phenomenon", he continues, "this has been going on for many years. Take mailing lists. Harold may be an outstanding expert on a particular topic, in part because other experts agree with him €¦ Yet given a choice between Harold and a mailing list, I’m better off at the mailing list, because the knowledge is in social interaction. The list is smarter than he is. This is how humans work and this is how we talk. Conversation drives bugs out of knowledge, as well as bias and prejudice."

Kids know that. When they do homework today they do it online with four or five instant messaging windows open. (They acquire their knowledge socially, but they are still graded individually, which needs to change, says Weinberger.) Web is more of everything. It’s more tags, more mess, more taxonomy. Link sharing has evolved into an act of generosity--a way for us to give away interesting stuff that may help or delight others. We add meaning (or, at least, significance) to those links by sharing them. We find ideas through other people and other people through ideas. This is conversation. This is the grandeur of miscellany.