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Article Excerpt
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Michael Wesch's video, Information R/evolution, focuses on an electric typewriter that could use a new ribbon. Under the drone of inane music, the video [http://www.you tube.com/watch?v=-4CV05HyAbM] presents a pre-computer information flow--typing on a piece of paper, carrying the typed page to a file cabinet, entering a library with bookshelves, thumbing through a typed card catalog, correcting errors by overtyping. (This must also be the pre-Witeout era.)
The video finds a file cabinet with microform cards and selects a 1995 issue of Newsweek. Displayed on a microform reader, the article predicts, "Why cyberspace isn't, and will never be, nirvana." The camera again lingers over the first typed document, almost illegible in its original state. But nirvana does arrive. We can tell because the music changes as the video displays word processing on a computer screen. It stays there a few moments before jumping into the web, all the while entering words and phrases, deleting and re-entering. With about 60 examples in 4 minutes, Wesch seems to marvel at the slightest digital editing technique.
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HappyDevil Comics' response to the Wesch video, Brad and Phil's Information R/evolution, picks up the library theme [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWmERReCRvg]. Of the duo, Phil's the dumb one. He visited a high school library once, so he knows about the public library. Having established the dork factor, HappyDevil, in a burst of creativity, simply replays Information R/evolution and we are back once again in a library with a card catalog, vertical files, and a typewriter.
Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, pays homage to David Weinberger's Everything Is Miscellaneous (2007) by filming pages from the book. The card catalog image comes straight from Weinberger, who consistently refers to card catalogs in the present tense, while never mentioning library online catalogs, a neat trick in a book that includes a visit to the catalog at the New York Public Library (pp. 46, 58). He even takes time to explain the inadequacies of a 3x5 card (p. 119).
A columnist for KMWorld, Weinberger identifies the web's digital information as stored randomly, hence his concept of everything being miscellaneous. With the sharing capabilities of social software, he promotes tagging and individual organizing as preferable to pre-organized information. Users search a set of tags for a momentary need. They sort the material, and when done, let everything return to the miscellaneous.
However, Weinberger gives very little advice about how to organize this miscellaneous material for maximum momentary value. Instead, he devotes much of the book to the weaknesses of pre-organized information, such as library classification and zoological taxonomies. This is an important development in the advancement of organized information. While each of us has always had the capability to organize whichever way we want, social networking offers tools to reorganize in an instant.
As a researcher of information arrangement, I approached Weinberger's book with excitement. The first fracture arrived early with descriptions of three photo archives (2007, pp. 17-23) and a sample photo with "a Civil War soldier eating outdoors" (p. 18). The Bettmann Archive holds historic photos and original card catalogs [http://www.corbis.com/BettMann100/Archive/BettmannArchive. asp]. Weinberger mentions that a card catalog cannot include a card for every access point. If there is no card for "eating outdoors," that Civil War photo may be unfindable. He then moves to Corbis, a commercial photo site [http://www.corbis.com], again using his Civil War example, commenting that the team of professional indexers and the online environment allow complete cataloging for every access point.
Next up is Weinberger's favorite, Flickr, where users upload their own photos and assign their own subjects as tags [http:// www.flickr.com]. I was eager to see how he would fit the Civil War photo into the tagging technique, but he switched examples, turning instead to "dogs wearing red clown noses" (p. 22), thus avoiding mention of a major tagging drawback. If an amateur tagger forgets to tag "eating outdoors" when uploading a photo of great-great-great-grandpa, that web photo is as unfindable an example of 19th-century alfresco dining as it is in the Bettmann's card catalog.
Later Weinberger tries another spin tactic with an apples-and-oranges comparison of Dewey's shelving classification and Amazon.com's subject search, never mentioning in this section that libraries also have subject search (2007, pp. 57-63). Perhaps to avoid reminding readers of this...
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