Many moons ago, I attended the inaugural MassTLC Social Media Cluster event, which Paul Gillin moderated (and who heads up the cluster) and David Weinberger guest spoke.

Then it seems I got thrown on every possible project I could’ve been thrown on, and neglected this post for a long time. I’m now trying to make good and save this blog from being nothing but podcast promos, crossposts to Doug’s other blog and softball updates–God help us all… Now, to make good…

David Weinberger has a new book coming out, “Everything is Miscellaneous“, which focuses on the shifting organization of knowledge, and specifically on the emerging Third Order of information abstraction, which I’ll get to in a moment.

David was an entertaining, engaging and thought-provoking speaker. His presentation seemed a bit scattered, but it’s probably just that he’s too smart for me to connect all the dots that he drew for us. He painted a lot of dots, and I’m starting to see the big picture–it’s an interesting one! Mind you, I haven’t read his book yet, so if I get any of this wrong, please let me know!

He opened the conversation discussing the traditional “broadcast” model of communications: the one-to-many approach. In this model, broad appeal on the part of the sender, and passive absorbtion on the part of the viewer, is incentivized. Today’s social media world is well past this, and well past even what many people call “many-to-many”: these days, it’s really what he calls “all-to-all”. He painted a picture of an increasingly chaotic sphere of information, an almost entropic system that we’ve been fighting with the same set of tools for years–the tools of categorization, of cataloguing, of organizing our minds to be able to deal with the chaos.

To make sense of it all, we compartmentalize and categorize–create order from chaos. He didn’t mention it in his presentation, but the old scientific dichotomous key comes to mind–a mostly binary set of choices that you make in order to find just the right kingdom, phylum, class, order, family genus and species for any given plant, animal, mushroom or other living thing. It’s great, but it just doesn’t always work. Order, it seems, comes with a cost. What do you do when your answer doesn’t fit nicely into one of the two choices–when the thing you’re trying to classify fits nicely not into one, but dozens or even hundreds of possibly categories? The “reality” we try to impose on the world is rather fallible and very limiting, and doesn’t reflect the multifaceted world we live in.

The “real”, he said, has a “nefarious” purpose: to keep things apart. In the traditional world-view, two things can’t occupy the same place–everything has its place. Information technology, however, has now allowed us to transcend this black-and-white view. “The bounds of the real are expanding, and don’t hold us anymore,” he told the audience.

As Booklist put it, “in the digital world the laws of physics no longer apply.” It makes for a messier, grittier, but realer world (if you don’t mind me slaughtering the English language–but in David’s world, who would?).

In today’s many-to-many world, David argued that we are approaching the reality that Nicholas Negroponte predicted back in 1995: The “Daily Me.” But Negroponte’s vision wasn’t a utopian one–he didn’t portray this new reality in a positive light, as it does have its downsides (think EPIC 2014). As Wikipedia puts it (bracketed comment mine):

The term has also been associated with the phenomenon of individuals customizing and personalizing their news feeds, resulting in their being exposed only to content they are already inclined to agree with. The “Daily Me” can thus be a critical component of the “Echo Chamber” effect, defined in an article in Salon by [none other than] David Weinberger as “those Internet spaces where like-minded people listen only to those people who already agree with them.”

Risks aside, “The Daily Me” is a powerful tool, as it takes advantage of a new order of information. Unlike our previous attempt to order the universe (the “Second Order,” which involved the Dewey Decimal System, card catalogs, really boring library sciences classes, etc.), the Third Order doesn’t require a strict but somewhat arbitrary classification mechanism. It requires content and meta-content. Content we already have. Meta-content is the key. The effectiveness of this new system relies not on the strength of the classification system (or the taxonomist), which doesn’t necessarily get better as it get bigger, but on the nature of knowledge, which gets stronger as it grows.

Enough theory. Why should any social media or PR practitioner care about such an academic topic? Because David’s offering a kind of handbook for forging a new reality here–sound like something PR people should care about? Youbetcha!

Hop over to David’s blog for a much better feel for this than I can give you. And grab the book while you’re at it!

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