From the Boidem -
an
occasional column on computers and information technologies in everyday life
October 31, 2007*:
Please organize me!
Anyone who glances, even cursorily, at my desk, will quickly
and readily, and probably also correctly, assume that I'm quite comfortable
living with disorganization. Put rather simply, disorganization has become an
integral part of my life. There's simply too much happening around us -
too much information, too many events, simply too much stuff accumulating -
to make putting things in their place (or even finding a place for them) possible.
On the whole, I try to laugh in the face of the threat of this disarray. I'll
often claim that I feel quite comfortable with the almost overwhelming randomness
of the things that pile up around me. I'm not really bothered by the fact that
the second law of thermodynamics seems to be marching through my life with a
vengeance.
Yet at the same time that I feel comfortable with this
perpetual disarray, I'm also acutely aware that an opposite expectation is competing
with my conscience. There's always the lingering feeling, perhaps even the fear,
that this isn't the way that grown up people are supposed
to behave. I'm supposed to be making order out of
chaos, not acquiescing to my inability to do so, and certainly not celebrating
it. I'm supposed to be making sense, and "sense" is a factor of organization,
of logic, of order.
Making sense may be the
opposite of the second law of thermodynamics. If we view a process by which
heat dissipates, by which a system moves toward diffusion of energy, we assume
that we're viewing it in its proper order. This
leads to one of the most accepted definitions of the second law, the simple
and straightforward claim that "things fall apart". About 85 years
ago, William Butler Yeats, in his perhaps too often quoted The
Second Coming, connected this falling apart to a loss of logic:
Things Fall Apart; the Center Cannot Hold
Is it only through Yeats' poetry
that falling apart and the inability of the center to hold are connected? After
all, perhaps it's only to me that the following reasoning seems rather obvious.
It is around the center that things revolve. The center is a focus, and as such
it often implies a purpose. When things fall apart they lose their purpose, they're
no longer anchored to anything that gives them meaning. It then becomes our job
to "organize" (or reorganize) them. But centers seem to have a somewhat
unavoidable tendency to get moved to the periphery. What's more, the "falling
apart" of things, or in this particular context, the center-no-longer-holding
of things seems to be an integral, an inevitable, part of our continuing march
toward greater knowledge of our world. As we learn
more, we more farther and farther away from any "center" that might
exist. Copernicus moved us from the center of the universe to one planet among
others revolving around the sun, and later astronomers continued demoting us until
we've become no more than a speck within a speck of a galaxy. In a similar manner,
Darwin took us away from being the pinnacle of creation, from being the ultimate
purpose of life on earth, and told us instead, among other things, that our existence
was little more than a successful adaptation, devoid of any actual purpose beyond
survival.
But these columns are supposed to deal with the integration
of the internet and information technologies in our lives, not with sophomoric
philosophical musings. What, if within this context it's proper to ask, is the
point here? Well, on a rather fundamental level, David Weinberger's recent Everything
is Miscellaneous can be understood as a celebration of our inability to organize
things. He tells us that if we really want to find something, the prevailing metaphor
of categorizing or compartmentalizing, it isn't the right way to go about doing
this. Weinberger traces a history of classification
from Aristotle to the present, and tells us that that any
attempt at "organizing" knowledge is not only arbitrary, but perhaps
even counter-productive. Our intentions may be good, but our attempts to organize
lead us to bark up a tree which might not be the one we want to climb. Weinberger
seems to be doing for knowledge what Copernicus did for the earth, and Darwin
did for humankind. It's no longer "the center cannot hold". Instead,
we're told that it's best to hold on to our knowledge without centering it.
What Weinberger tells us, however, seems to go beyond a simple
injunction about how we should, or shouldn't organize our knowledge. It also tries
to tell us something about our place in the universe. Throughout history or attempts
to organize knowledge have been more than just attempts to make it more accessible
to us. These attempts have also been a means by which we find our place in the
universe. Yet Weinberger now tells us that we don't really have a place,
but rather many places, and that all places that we might choose as ours are equally
valid. If this is the case, even though what he suggests seems considerably less
earth-shattering than the ramifications of the Copernian or Darwinian revolutions,
there's a very fundamental threat here to how we
see ourselves. Though we may take pride in being disorganized, most of us probably
have a deep-seated sense that it's our responsibility to create order, that it's
ethically wrong to acquiesce to disorganization.
We seem to desperately want to avoid the fact that living with disorganization
is really possible. We constantly seek to establish order, and if establishing
that order isn't possible, then perhaps the best we can do is uncover the organizing
value of disorder. I don't have any statistics on this matter, but I wouldn't
be surprised if many readers of Weinberger's book start out resisting its arguments,
but ultimately find comfort in them, along the lines of "if you can't beat
'em, join 'em": If we're condemned to living with disorganization, then at
least we can acknowledge that through maintaining disorder we're more able to
find information that we want or need.
Having more or less examined the almost existential meaning
of disorganization, all I have to do now is find some elegant way of ending this
column. Often, I write the final paragraph of these columns well before I write
the middle. Having a sandwich-like framework, knowing where I've started, and
where I intend to end up, I can ordinarily allow myself to drift a bit in between
without getting totally lost. But disorganization is as disorganization does.
In this particular column, rather than knowing precisely where I'm heading, I've
let myself wander (even more than usual). And this means that as I find myself
at what I expect to be the end, I'm quite unclear as to how
this column should be brought to a close. There's probably a certain degree
of poetic justice in letting disorganization get the best of me and in simply
allowing this column to drift off into incoherence
That's
it for this edition. Reactions and suggestions can be sent to: Jay Hurvitz
back
to the Boidem Contents Page Return to Luftmentsh