Here's another talk on knowledge preservation and organization.
Weekly topic
Clay Shirky - Making Digital Durable - What Time Does to Categories (2005)
#clayshirkymakingdigitaldurable
Submission statement
The talk approaches the difficulty of digital preservation, classification systems and tagging.
The main argument is:
> Today I want to talk about categorization, and I want to convince you that a lot of what we think we know about categorization is wrong. In particular, I want to convince you that many of the ways we're attempting to apply categorization to the electronic world are actually a bad fit, because we've adopted habits of mind that are left over from earlier strategies.
– Clay Shirky - Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags (2005)
An example of problems with categorization:
> The disadvantage of systems like [the Dewey Decimal System] is also that human thought has gone into them. The advantages and the disadvantages are the same thing, which is to say they necessarily reflect the biases of its creators. Now it's easy to say Oh, Dewey. There's obvious bias there. There wasn't careful thought, we didn't know as much about classification systems, we're effectively over that now. The Seattle Library, the Rem Koolhaas library which has gotten so much attention, has as its internal plans – speaking of shearing lines – the idea of a continuous collection. There's a single ramp that runs through the entire building in a flat spiral from the top all the way to the bottom. And that is poured so that the Dewey Decimal System will be reflected directly in the architecture of the building. It's one thing to say Well the Dewey system is a kind of a mistake, and we know that mistake and we don't make those kinds of mistakes anymore. Except that we do. In fact we are currently pouring our mistakes into concrete.
Again, in our world, topics like this can seem like trivia for librarians to nerd out on. Except in the new, urgent world of converging crises, this translates directly to wasted time, effort, money and energy. Compounding complexity seizes projects. We are potentially fostering a more discouraging environment right at the t
... keep reading on reddit ➡I am the author of two books on social media, Here Comes Everybody (2008) and Cognitive Surplus (2010.) I have been writing about the social and economic effects of the internet since the early 1990s. @cshirky and http://shirky.com/weblog/
Most recently (as in published this morning) I wrote a piece about what the initial failure and subsequent stabilization of Healthcare.gov says about managing large technical projects. http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140743/clay-shirky/the-key-to-successful-tech-management
The folks over at HackerNews announced today some organizational and moderation changes. In the comments for the announcement, someone submitted a link to the titular speech. The speech is split into three parts, and while it's all very interesting, the first part is what I wanted to draw attention to.
In Shirky's own voice:
>The best explanation I have found for the kinds of things that happen when groups of humans interact is psychological research that predates the Internet, so the first part is going to be about W.R. Bion's research, which I will talk about in a moment, research that I believe explains how and why a group is its own worst enemy.
I found the speech, while not particularly enlightening (anyone who is familiar with the concept of Eternal September will be familiar with the concepts elaborated on in the speech) certainly amusingly apt at describing the problems inherent to reddit. Most specifically, it addresses the historical background for the "hands off" approach to moderation that reddit prides itself on.
To sum the relevant parts up, for people who are too fucking lazy to click on a god damned link and read through it:
>The best explanation I have found for the ways in which this pattern establishes itself, the group is its own worst enemy, comes from a book by W.R. Bion called "Experiences in Groups," written in the middle of the last century.
>Bion was a psychologist who was doing group therapy with groups of neurotics. (Drawing parallels between that and the Internet is left as an exercise for the reader.) The thing that Bion discovered was that the neurotics in his care were, as a group, conspiring to defeat therapy.
>...
>Now, Bion decided that what he was watching with the neurotics was the group defending itself against his attempts to make the group do what they said they were supposed to do. The group was convened to get better, this group of people was in therapy to get better. But they were defeating that. And he said, there are some very specific patterns that they're entering into to defeat the ostensible purpose of the group meeting together. And he detailed three patterns.
>The first is sex talk, what he called, in his mid-century prose, "A group met for pairing off." And what that means is, the group conceives of its purpose as the hosting of f
... keep reading on reddit ➡