Blog #4

Chapter 10: The Work of Knowledge
CODA: Misc.
& wrapping up

The universe is complex, yet everyone tries to simplify it, bending the interpretation to their needs. We can disagree with someone’s biases or opinions, but not with the facts themselves. These facts are the common ground needed to understand one another, so we can have an engaging conversation about the ideas related to the facts. In the third order of order, all of these ideas and facts are not ordered in a neat little tree, they are so interconnected that they form a cloud of collective knowledge, and require global input. This input makes the collective knowledge evolve until it reaches a stable consensus.

The world is miscellaneous in a different way than the third order is miscellaneous. We make choices about what we include in our miscellaneous knowledge tree- we can choose to disregard some of the leaves of the tree if that’s how we choose to organize our knowledge, and thus our understanding of the world. We can’t understand what we don’t know. And we are learning what we know in new ways within the digital disorder: we are learning more about how the world is connected, rather than how we’ve chosen to categorize it. It’s only through this way of lumping information that we’ve realized everyone has different needs when they’re on the hunt for knowledge. Because of these differences, miscellaneous organization using metadata (and now metaknowledge) is becoming our new tree of knowledge, one that uses Web 2.0 to connect people and ideas like never before.

In conclusion: The third order of order can be so miscellaneous that every person with every need imaginable can find the exact information they are looking for by using metadata in a search engine.