They were trying to reconstruct a reality that people are comfortable with because of tradition, or because they learned a song about nine planets when they were kids. So they could go home without having the world rise up in anger.
I believe that's exactly what happened. One of them said, "We can't say there are no planets, there's no definition, because we'll be laughed at, everyone knows there are planets."
So here's a missed opportunity for scientists to have said, look, of course there are nine objects circling the sun that we have a particular interest in, because we have tradition and mythology about it, and that's great, we love them. But we should recognize, there are billions of things circling the sun, and they're interesting in different ways, they have different properties. So in addition to these nine that really have nothing in common except that we like them (there are other objects that are basically the same size, and so on), let's consider what's circling the sun as a soup of things that have attributes. Let's talk about some of the categories that are really interesting scientifically.
I talked recently with Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist at the Museum of Natural History in New York and an author, and he basically says, there are four objects in the solar system that have atmospheres -- three planets and one moon, Titan, circling Saturn. That's really interesting, because atmospheres are interesting -- big rocks are not all that interesting. There are four things that have water, that's really interesting; if you care about extraterrestrial life, that becomes a very interesting category. Things that are hurtling towards us -- that's an interesting category, also.
Tyson says, at the Museum of Natural History, they no longer focus on planets, they focus on the interesting clusters and categories.
In a sense, the form of "Everything Is Miscellaneous" does not reflect the content; it's not miscellaneous, it's a single book. You're a writer who's comfortable on the Web, the Web is your home, yet you made this a book.
My previous book, "Small Pieces Loosely Joined," I wrote online. Totally online. It was so online that every day I posted the current draft. This was a book that I wrote and unwrote, Penelope-like, every night -- I'd get up and undo what I'd written the night before, because it was difficult and I wasn't getting it right. I posted, I had a discussion board. Hardly anybody followed it -- why would you, knowing that the next day I'm going to undo it because it wasn't good enough?
That was an interesting experiment, and I'm glad I did it. With this one, that was an option, but I had an intuition that I didn't want to write it in public. In large part it was because I wanted to write this one better. I wanted to be able to work with my head down and door closed and try to peg pieces together well enough. So I did. I only feel a little guilty about that. I would post pieces and ideas on my weblog, mainly ideas, and that was very helpful.
It's an argument and development of ideas, and books are a good form for that. But it's also on paper because there's an economic system that rewards me for doing that, and I want to make a living. And there's certainly a price. It's much harder to talk about it online because it's not available online.
The world "Everything Is Miscellaneous" describes looks like one where there's a lot more work for the individual. When you put an expert on a pedestal, you're saying, I don't have to think about this anymore, I trust this authority. On the one hand, you're relieving us of the pressure to feel that we have to organize everything perfectly, but on the other, there's a message that now we're going to have to sweat to reshape the stuff that we encounter each time we encounter it.
In the early 1990s, there were all these fear-mongering books warning us that we were about to face information overload. And the amount of information got to be way higher than anyone anticipated, but we're not drowning -- we're doing really, really well.
We're able to do this well because we generated more information about information. The solution to the information overload problem is more information!
So now the complaint is, there's too much metadata! We're going to be overwhelmed with metadata. Every time we want to know what to believe in the newspaper, we're going to have to start checking the discussion page, and looking up the pseudonym of the person to see what else they said.
I think that's not going to happen. Because the aim of the miscellaneous is not to keep things miscellaneous; it's rather to be able to find exactly what we need, to cluster things as we need them, and to do so really easily. And so we are in the process of evolving tools that let us do that.
So should you believe what's in Wikipedia? Jimmie Wales, its founder, would say no, not without checking. But I don't think that's going to be the final answer. Because we don't have time to do more work. Today we work to believe what's in the encyclopedia, tomorrow we have to work to believe what's in the newspaper, what the sports score is, whether the recipe we just found online will in fact kill us. So we will evolve trust mechanisms that will give us the shortcuts we need.
We've already evolved tons of them, but these will occur at the metadata level. So, for example, there's no reason that the International Astronomical Union couldn't go through Wikipedia, find the articles about astronomy, and find the versions of those articles that it thinks are right. Can't find one? Fix it up and make it right and point to that one. And it would build its own astronomical Wikipedia that is nothing but a metadata level. And if you're a schoolkid and you want to know the truth about Jupiter, you go to the IAU Wikipedia, which only contains the pages that they certify. So there's the authority again, but it's pointing at other stuff.
It's not that a new single order has emerged, or that new single authorities have emerged to replace the old ones. It's a fundamentally different sort of authority -- an authority that points. It points beyond itself, and there's always more, now. And there's always the possibility of seeing, how did they get there?
We certainly need the convenience. We cannot always have to do research to figure out who won the baseball game last night!
About the writer
Scott Rosenberg is Salon's vice president for new projects. He is the author of "Dreaming in Code" and also maintains a blog.
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