OPEN

An article in the Salon has made me once again regretting using the slow-boat option for Amazon delivery of my copy of David Weinberger‘s Everything is Miscellaneous and lumping it in with CD that means it won’t be with me, well, now. Here’s a sample of the Salon article that gives some clues as to why I can’t wait to get my hands on the book…

The rise of the Web has dethroned authorities, atomized our culture and set us loose in the resulting sea of fragments. This familiar sky-is-falling argument regularly inspires an anguished plea: We must restore order in the messy digital realm! Won’t someone organize this endless churning chaos? Can’t we clean up the Web?

David Weinberger says, nah. For one thing, such an effort would be futile. More important, it misses a great opportunity technology has opened before us — a chance to transform how we think about, well, everything.

….The argument goes like this: As long as knowledge was organized physically, on paper, in books and card catalogs and such, we remained stuck in the belief that there is “one right way” to define, organize and think about any subject. Now we’ve moved information into the infinitely mutable realm of digital data — where anything can point to anything else, space keeps expanding faster than we can fill it, and we can reshuffle and re-sort at a keystroke.

In this world, the same thing can “be” in more than one place — it can, in fact, be in as many places as we want. That means we have a chance to think more nimbly and flexibly — to reorganize knowledge from multiple perspectives to suit our changing needs. We’re not losing context; we’re gaining contexts.

From the chatter about it out there and images like the one below from Euan’s Flickr stream, I get the feeling a lot of people at Reboot will have read. Oh well, I guess they can tell me what I’ve got ot look forward to…

Meantime, the David Weinberger podcast series around the book has won a permanent place on my iTunes list. It’s brilliant. So far the interview with Markos Zuniga of the Daily Kos and the Adrianna Huffington interviews have really stood out for me. I especially liked that the interviews had surprises to talk about and didn’t slip easily into a consensus about social media and what it means.

One theme on my personal voyage of discovery into the new web has been one of being constantly being surprised (and often delighted) by what’s out there and how things really work in communities and networks. I stop expecting …

: : Incidentally, thanks to a wet weekend in Brighton and some this ha

One post on Cognitive Edge has really got me thinking. Still mulling it but wanted to share anyway…