This past weekend, I finished up reading Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger. The main premise of the book is that there is no one best way that you can organize any group of information. He then goes on to explain how Web 2.0 technologies allow us to dynamically organize the massive collection of disorganized, miscellaneous information on the internet in ways that suit our needs at the moment.
I want to delve a bit more deeply into the concept of orders of organization that Weinberger talks about. The First Order is the physical. Knowledge is condensed into a readable form in books. Books are physical objects comprised of atoms and are thus bound to the laws of physics. They have to exist at some point in space and at some point in time. They can’t occupy the same space as any other object. A group of books can only be arranged on a shelf in one way at any one time. So, you may line the books on your shelf up by alphabetical order by author, or you may organize them by subject, title, height, thickness, whatever you want — you can pick any method of organization you want, but you can only pick one. This is the First Order of organization. The Dewey Decimal System (which Weinberger spends a great many pages discussing) describes one way to physically organize books in a library.
The Second Order introduces metadata (data about data) — we’re talking about the card catalog. Certainly, the card catalog doesn’t tell us as much as the books themselves do. However, multiple cards referencing the same book can be put in multiple places. As a result, the book can appear in the system in two (or more) places at once. We can organize the same information in multiple ways. But this Second Order still has its physical limits. For example, you can only have so many cards before the system becomes unusable.
In the Third Order, hyperlinks, tagging, playlists and folksonomies allow us to organize whatever information we want however we want. We can find connections we never knew existed, completely on the fly by bringing our information in the digital realm, making it miscellaneous, and then applying technologies that allow us to easily turn knowledge upside down and inside out.
When looked at in this way, the First Order becomes almost irrelevant. Weinberger asks us to consider Wikipedia, where pages don’t even “exist” until a collection of servers assemble them on the fly. Which sector of which hard drive are those bytes stored on? Does it matter? Contrast that with the Encyclopaedia Britannica. You’d better know where Volume 1 is or you’ll never be able to read about the fascinating lives of aardvarks.
As I read this, I thought of Second Life.
Is Second Life more like the Britannica than Wikipedia? Is Second Life less miscellaneous than the web? Sure, it often is seemingly random, but does it allow us to organize information in the Third Order?
One take on Second Life that I’ve read a few times is something along the lines of, “What if you were looking for a book, and you could browse through a virtual book store in Second Life, and with a single mouse click, buy the book and have it delivered to you in the real world?”
Would this make for a better store-browsing experience than shopping in real life, or a better online experience than Amazon.com? I don’t think I’d want to browse through infinitely long virtual rows of every book ever written. It would be like sifting through the entire Library of Congress every time I went to buy a book. Since Second Life simulates a kind of world with physical rules, we’re bound by its physical limits, and stuck with its First Order organization.
Sure you can fly and teleport in Second Life, but you’re still limited to a four-dimensional spacetime experience. You can only be in one place at a time. Events happen only once, at a certain time. You can craft an amazing island, with buildings featuring architecture unrivaled by any construction in real life. However, if you throw a party in Second Life, and someone shows up a half-hour after it’s over, rather than experiencing the communal bliss of interacting with people from the farthest reaches of the globe, they’ll instead be standing alone in a big empty building. In fact, the number one complaint I hear about Second Life is that when people log on, it always seems empty. It’s clear that you need to know not only WHERE to go, but WHEN to go. This is a limitation the web mitigated, that Second Life is reintroducing.
What might a Third-Order Second Life look like? Imagine being able to form space around you at any time. Why should Second Life necessarily mimic a physical reality everyone can agree on? What if “here” is not where I am on a grid, but rather some subjective “space” where I can pull together people and objects in order to create my unique experience? Maybe on my screen, we’re standing on a mountain, and on yours we’re on a beach. Or maybe we could both be in two places at once. What if any “thing” could be two things or three, or could be one thing for me and one thing for you, but it was exactly what we both wanted? What if we could trade, not just playlists, but whole realities?