Picnic07: Weinberger, Keen and the question of authority in a miscellaneous world

Running notes from the Picnic07 conference in Amsterdam.

Moderator (and WSJ tech columnist) Walt Mossberg: "There is a digital tidal wave that changes every walk of life, every business, every part of the society. The question of this session is: how can we tell who has authority in today's world?" Two opposite points of view in the session: Andrew Keen (left in the picture) and David Weinberger.

First, David Weinberger, author of "Everything is Miscellaneous" and Fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center.
He says: We are very good at organizing things, we have a lot of experience in organizing people and goods. But there is always one box, in the organization chart or in your kitchen, labeled "miscellaneous", where we put in things that don't fit. When the box is too big, then we have to fix the organization. But digitally, allowing that box to grow and take over the whole organization it's possibly the right thing to do.
There is more of everything on the web: millions of entries for any words. How do we organize this?
The real world's key principle seems to be to keep things apart -- to structure them, to separate them into bins and boxes. We can't fit more in a given space (he shows a picture of two cars that tried to go through a too-narrow passage and got stuck). We are good at organizing physical things. But there is a price. When you start to organize ideas into the physical medium of paper, for instance, we need people (editors) making decisions, deciding what comes first (front page). In Western culture since the Greeks we have assumed that ideas are organized the way the real world is (he shows a beef chart). Truth is, there are many ways to slice and dice and categorize ideas (he discusses the definition of "planet"). There are so many properties and attributes, each of which can be used to organize and categorize. To think that there is a single order of the universe, is to mistake the universe for a shoestore.
Now we are digitizing everything. We are getting away from authority that comes directly from the limitations of paper.
First principle of change is: leaf on many branches. If you sell a digital camera, you put it in one shelf, you can't put the same camera in multiple stores.
Second: messiness has a virtue. If you post something online and there are so many links to it that you can't even follow them, your post is a huge success, because each of those messy links adds value. Messiness is good online, you can sort through using a computer.
Third: no difference between data and metadata. In the real world we understand the difference between them, we don't confuse the label and the thing. Online it gets messier. Online, if you search Herman Melville, you will get the content of his books or a picture of the author -- there is no difference between data and metadata.
Fourth: unowned order. If you go into a clothing store, the rational thing to do would be to create a pile with all things your size, because all the rest to you is just noise, useless. But if you do that the store owner will throw you out, because he owns the organization of the store. Online, it's exactly the opposite: there, the user of the info controls the organization. The site may offer a classic "tree" (menu) but systems of faceted organization allow you to select "only items under 200 USD" or "only this specific brand" etc. The user decides what the order is. The other way to take control of the organization is through tagging (he shows the de.licio.us link-sharing site).
We are leaving behind the time when we thought -- because we had to -- to organize the world according to experts who would exclude things of no value. But in a world of abundance, that no longer is the only right strategy. Let's take the leaves off the tree, make a miscellaneous pile, a pile rich with connection, with metadata, saturated with links and tags etc, which includes everything.
The point is: we cannot predict what other people are going to be interested in. And now we are no longer forced to decide for others. We can postpone the moment when we need to organize, because we have the tools. Include and postpone, which is radically opposed to the limitations of the real under which we have been living until recently.
Experts remain available of course. The way the editors of the NYT organize the paper is still available to us.
He challenges the idea that information is an asset that a business needs to protect: it's better to let information go, so that it can be meshed up with other information and add value.
We are coming out of a time of mass media -- very few people got to speak and many to listen. The principle to reach the widest number of people was to make the simplest content possible. So we've been treated like idiots for generations. That's true in news, in politics. "Keep it simple". He gives an example of a Bush speech, that was written to be "kept simple", but within hours many bloggers had analyzed it, making it more complex (comparing with previous speeches, analyzing, etc) and therefore making it more interesting. Bloggers make things more complex because that's what humans do. That's one of the reasons why we all rushed into blogging.
Part of this regime of simplification was also a regime of implicitness. Implicit is the whole meaning and juice of life. When we read a newspaper, we can understand the metadata (bigger headline = more important, etc). But we get confused at the implicit vs explicit thing. Humans are not computers, you can't press a button and make explicit everything that's implicit (for example, I can't be immediately explicit about my kids, that's unsaid, that's emotions, etc).
Social networks require us to make information explicit (when we create a profile and connect with people). Around this expliciteness (how you know a "friend" etc) grows human flesh. That's why Facebook is so successful. 
Using the example of a discussion on the Wikipedia deep-frided mars bar article he quotes Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia) on neutrality: "a page is neutral when people have stopped arguing about it".
Those who don't engage in the conversation become less relevant (the NYT tried to make some money out of its columnists with TimesSelect, but it made his columnists less relevant because they were less present in the conversation -- the Times abandoned TS). Compare newspaper front-pages decided by editors, and Digg user-chosen headlines.
Where does Wikipedia get its credibility? After all you may hit it right after a lunatic has changed some important fact. (By the way, Wikipedia defies the idea that facts are straightforward). Wikipedia appends a lot of notices and disclaimers to articles announcing the problems in articles ("the neutrality of this article is disputed" etc), so it's willing to admit "this article is not very good". That's not something you will find in newspapers, because mistakes diminish their authority. That's paper-based authority. And their unwilligness to be comfortable with human faillability will make that kind of authority less relevant.
What we are doing now with the web, this pile of connected miscellaneous stuff, is that we are externalizing meaning. We do it every time we use tags. Tags allow us to link different pieces. Those relationships are there for us to understand how things are connected. The web was built to solve the problem of messiness -- of making messiness accessible, to allow to create dynamic "orders" ot of the miscellaneous pile. We have a generational task, which is to build this infrastructure of meaning, and that's not only the work of experts, it's the taks of all of us.

Andrew Keen, author of "The cult of the amateur", is supposed to do the rebuttal. His book suggests that the Web hasn't produced much in terms of sustained quality because it doesn't provide an ecosystem to nurture talent.
He is in a tough position, because Weinberger's polished keynote would require a careful dissecting, not just a few-minutes "contrarian" speech. But Mossberg sides with Keen.
Weinberger, says Keen, brings together two worlds: philosophy and marketing. "What you heard today  was a philosopher selling the web to you, in a sexy, seductive way".
There is one issue in which fundamentally they disagree: complexity. Weinberger says we want more complexity, more complexity is interesting.
"I believe he is making a categorical error. He's mixing up media with the world. Let's assume he's right, human beings are indeed complex. However, what David wants is for media (Wikipedia, etc) to reflect the world.
Media should not reflect the world. For me media need to educate, inform and entertain. It doesn't have to reflect the world. The most successful media is not complex. Doesn't need to be utterly simple, am not arguing in favor of dumbing down. But the job of media is to simplify the world, so that we can understand what is happening in the world". It's too easy to criticize the "mainstream media". "We need media not to trivialize the world, but to simplify in a way that makes it readable. In my view the Internet is not doing that today: it increases the confusion, the noise. The job of gatekeepers in traditional media is to simplify -- like a tech columnist who simplifies my choice between buying a Mac or a PC. I think we are confusing categories here".

Comments

[Bebop]

Very significant: you do a great job bringing this knowledge to us, and what do you get as a first comment - spam.

[BG]

Yes Bebop. Thanks for the "great job", will try to continue tonight and tomorrow. And I deleted the spam comment...