Liberal Education Today

Notes on David Weinberger's keynote address to the NFAIS conference, titled "Beyond Authority." The content draws greatly on Weinberg's 2007 book, Everything Is Miscellaneous.

Weinberger begins by describing the traditional information order, which is predicated on the physical scarcity of objects and information-bearing objects. Authority and institutions spring from these limitations. This order has several ranks: first, being the physical location of objects; second, classic metadata; third, digital information. The third order's arrival upsets the second in several ways.

"Leaf on many branches" - each object can be described in many categories, located in many positions.
"Messiness is a virtue" - messes indicate accretion of information.
"No difference between metadata and data" - we use digitized data for the purposes of metadata, finding and identifying stuff.
"Users own organization" - users generate organizational practices based on their needs. Example: "the new front page." Must be plural, social: "we can't do this by ourselves."

Quick discussion of Twitter: it could be the poster child of triviality. But it fills gaps between people in unusual ways, and a phenomenal way of spreading news.

One practice: don't exclude anything, for older reasons of scarcity. Include everything, because it's cheap or free to do so, and could be interesting down the road. "We cannot anticipate all users' needs."

On Wikipedia: lauds its habit of adding problem notices to articles. Also draws our attention to Wikipedia's discussion tab, for opening up social construction of knowledge. This draws on other digital practices of socially developing knowledge, such as email list discussions.

How does authority change as a result of this third order? Authority becomes multiple and nuanced. Opportunities for context-specific authorization. Creating more information is the way to feed into handling too much information (!).

Question from audience: how useful are user-generated tags? Answer: important complement to content owners' ontologies.
Another question: will information outpace storage, given the size of scientific data? Weinberger is unsure, but thinks it's likely we'll keep growing storage.
One more question: when does one exclude, as with filtering? Answer: not now, since there's tremendous economic incentive to helping people select stuff.