Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Blog 4

On page #88 of Everything is Miscellaneous Weinberger states that "every time you organize matters in one way, you are disordering them in another,". For some reason this jumped out at me more than anything else. I think to a certain extent this is definitely true. Take the exercise we did in class for example. When we organized the circles into groups according to overall color, we completely disregarded multiple other categories that the circles could have fallen into. Even when we put all of the circles into a grid with each column representing color and each row representing something else, we were still ignoring certain aspects that needed to be accounted for. This also made me think back on our previous blog posts about how we organize our own things. When I organize my movies by quality, I disorganize them by genre, actor, director, etc.

But is this always true of organization? I'm not so sure. Newegg.com is a good example of this. They have an inventory of thousands of items, and I bet you could find any one particular thing you are looking for. That is because each item is organized into categories. But not just one category, multiple categories. I think that organization only creates disorganization when the organization is over simplified. I like to think of this as 2d organization. Each thing can only fit into one place, which of course creates disorder. However, if each thing is allowed to fit into an unlimited amount of places depending on a multitude of criteria I like to think of it as 3d organization. At least, this is how I visualize it.
Tagging is a great example of this. Let's say I take a photograph of a dog and a cat playing together with a sunset in the background. I may tag it as dog, but someone else will probably come along and also tag it cat. Maybe then a third person will come along and tag it as artsy or something cause of the sunset, who knows. How can adding these tags for every minute detail possibly do anything but help to organize this photo into a database of other photos?


6 comments:

  1. It is weird to think about how organizing something is disorganizing it. Considering many of us organize our tangible objects by personal preferences and have become so accustomed to how figures of authority organize other things, that we don't think about all the other possible ways things can be place. And now the web is allowing everyone to organize in different ways and share that organization with others.

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  2. when i was reading this part on how organizing is disorganizing, i immediately thought back to when I was young, and my mom and dad would tell me how messy my room was, and that they were amazed I was ever able to find anything. My room was organized in a messy yet functional way, I knew where all of my toys were... the majority of the time. I remember being frustrated that they would make me clean my room, because that is how they organized their lives. In this way they were disorganizing my life and organizing theirs... at the expense of my toys

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  3. I agree that having more categories is helpful when organizing things in the third order, but in a way, doesn't having so many categories have the potential to cause confusion? If you are in fact looking for something online, you know exactly what it is but are unable to define where it would be placed, how easy is it to find it?

    To comment on Emily's response, I never really thought about parents causing disorganization in their kids lives when trying to organize theirs, but it is so true.

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  4. I think that the idea of parents coming in and 'messing up' our childhood organization is a really interesting reflection as to how increasing our orders of order requires a certain flexibility. As Tatiana points out, confusion is a big problem with ordering things along many different axis, and when we age I imagine that our minds become more rigid. We are unwilling to look at the same problems of ordering in new or different ways and we settle into habits. Maybe because we grew up with technology and this new kind of flexibility we won't be as bad as our parents. I still would like any future children to have a clean room though.

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  5. This is a great summary and elaboration on some of the points in chapter 5, but you didn't really do the assignment prompt. The prompt reads: "Describe the connections you see between Weinberger's ideas thus far and the "What is Web 2.0" and "Web Squared" articles from weeks1&2. Make sure to make specific references to the texts (either by quoting or clearly summarizing key points)" and I don't see those connections being made. That being said, interesting post...but just not on point.

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  6. your idea of "organizing 2d" vs. "organizing 3d" is just Weinberger's entire point but stated in a different way with different buzzwords. The idea that physical organization systems make assumptions about knowledge and of course make statements about the importance of somethings, or "organization 2d" as you put it, is weinberger's point in the first three chapters. "Organization 3d" is the Third Order of Order, it's being able to give multiple categories to things in the digital world. It isn't restricted by physicality and required to be in one place at a time. It isn't arbitrary and doesn't make assumptions like topical organization does. That's what Weinberger is talking about, you just gave it new terms.

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