what's at heart

The following is an interesting transcript of a speech given by David Weinberger I found as I was translating... I looked up the term "what's at heart" on google and this cached link was in the results, under the title “Man:”. Once I read the last line again (because I tend to read the last line before the first) I had forgotten how I landed there. When I remembered, I smiled at the relation. It is longer than a usual blog entry but his thoughts on tagging, taxonomies, ethics and morality and blogging are inspiring and, well, this being a blog that wants to be a springboard for new ideas, alternative views and commentary I thought it would be fitting.



David Weinberger
Dinner Speech, January 21st, 2005.

I was thinking about what to talk about to this group. I want to do this presentation with my eyes closed actually- I'd be a little less intimidated. And I kept coming back to three topics and I couldn't figure out. You want to do one topic and you go from A,B,C,D, and you're done. And I couldn't so I am going to talk about three topics that are essentially unrelated, because I think there's actually some sort of formal similarity among them. And I realized actually just a little bit ago that, in talking about three topics relatively briefly, you know five, six seven minutes each, that I was like blogging. That's basically what I'm doing. Putting three unrelated topics together as if they have some meaning. …. So this is so disjointed I'm actually going to have to announce: now I am done with this topic and I'm going to start the next topic. And as you can see on my notes, the topics are actually in orange, the three topics are: tags, or taxonomy if you prefer, tags, ethics but actually philosophy of morality, not about business ethics, and then briefly about blogging, and I'll be pretty much done.

So I want to start by talking about taxonomy because pretty much, for the past couple of weeks, I've been woking on a perpetual book proposal. The proposal is always gonna be done in two weeks. and it will be. It's going to be done in two weeks now. The proposal is up to 25 thousand words for a 60 thousand word book. And the topic has something to do with the fact that when you digitize information, the basic fundamental principles by which you organize it are radically different than the principles you use to organize stuff in the real world. And but those principles we use in the real world are what's guided knowledge. I mean knowledge is basically for 2500 years its been how you organize your thoughts, how you organize and classify things. So if we're changing the basic principles of organization then that should have some effect on knowledge, and the stuff that spins out the knowledge, like you institutions. And that's what the book is about. Um, so I want to talk about that for a moment because there's been for the past few weeks sort of a hot topic. Um, has been tags, among the technorati, the cyberati… the technorati, digirati, cyberati, whatever. Just the rati. and yes. And there's something really exciting and interesting going on.

And so we start from the traditional, the context of this is that the traditional way we organize stuff is canonical. And the canonical example is the Dewey decimal system. The Dewey decimal system which organizes all of human knowledge to such a degree of precision that we know exactly where to place the books on the shelves. And the library becomes, thanks to Dewey, it becomes not an alphabetical set of books organized by author alphabetically, which is what it was. It becomes actually a map of the landscape of knowledge itself. As you walk through the library, that is the geography of knowledge, as Dewey decided. But Dewey was this 23-year old punk in 1876. he was at a school for a couple of years. He went to this incredibly fundamentalist narrow-minded Christian school, tiny school, and he came out of it and said, that would be a good thing, I'll organize all knowledge. and being completely rational, he decided to intersect it with numbers. So we got the Dewey decimal system. He decided not entirely on his own but pretty much, that there were ten big categories, and with the decimal thing, so each is going to get a hundred sub-categories, so we have a thousand integers to divide up, and he did it. Its amazing. But the result is that whn you look at the classifications, they're whacky at best. So in the 200's, which is religion, religion and theology, you have a hundred numbers to play with. Dewey had a hundred numbers. 88 of them, of the integers are given to Christian topics. Jews get 296, Moslems and religions derived from Islam get 297. and the budhists? They're to the right of the decimal point. So you ask yourself, why hasn't this been fixed? You know the Dewey decimal system is owned by the OCLC, these are librarians, these are … these are professional librarians. They're not narrow-minded religious bigots. I mean these are people who are dedicated, I mean quite the contrary. I meant that as positive. So why haven't the librarians – who must clearly understand that this is an issue – fixed it? And the reason is you'd have to send thousands of local librarians into the bookshelves with razor blades to scrape off the white paint on the back of the books. And as soon as you'd done that and renumbered them all and you'd got it right – and by the way you'd have to do a lot of shuffling because it's a finite number of integers that you have with the Dewey decimal system. So you'd have to dethrone somethings, and that's painful. And as soon as you did it, you would have the Jews for Jesus arguing that they should be under Judaism where the Jews will kick them out immediately [l]. and you have the you know the Sunnis and Shiites both ganging up on the Bahai's thinking that's a trash religion, the way you know some people, think scientology is, and so you'd have all of this, ok, ahem. [l].. and of course I don't speak for the Berkman center… if we don't want to get rattlesnakes in our mailboxes you have to have that disclaimer.

So then you'd have all the gender issues, and it would go on forever. And you would never ever get this organization of knowledge right. Its not a solvable problem. It cant be done. Theres not a right way of doing it because there's no single way of organizing this stuff. Taxonomies are not reflections of nature, they're tools. And tools depend on what you want to do. It depends on your context. So along comes tagging. And tagging, its been around forever of course but its become famous and popular because a couple of sites, in particular, have put it to good use. And the first one is del.icio.us. how many of you have been to del.icio.us, know what it is? Ok. So I'll explain it briefly. The coolest domain name in history, also the most annoying to type, because its del.icio.us. and the guy who did it, Joshua, what's his name? Schachter. And his address is something like Joshua at burri dot to. so he seems to like this way of naming things. so tagging is not a new idea but del.icio.us gives us a reason to do it. Del.icio.us is a very simple site, really brilliant. It's a bookmarking site. So at one level all you do is you find a page you like, and you click a button, and now on your page at del.icio.us that page is recorded. And while you're doing that you're encouraged to, there's a blank field, and you can type in a tag. You can put any text you want, that will help you find it as you build up a long list, I think he has like 20 thousand, his own list, Joshua has maybe 20 thousand of his own, something like that. So here's a tag, you create a tag, type in some text, and now you can find your stuff. So that's useful. What makes it really exciting is that del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site. So you can see other peoples bookmarks. You want to see what ethan is bookmarking you can just go to his site and see all the stuff that he's doing. But what makes it really really exciting is that you can get the people out of the way and just see all the pages that have been tagged with a particular word. So if you're ethan you might want to find all of the pages that people have bookmarked, including yourself, tagged with Ghana. If you're me, I'm following taxonomies, so I look at, see all the pages, other people doing you research for you . Its fantastic. And you can get it as an rss feed. So you go into your aggregator – your aggravator – and subscribe to that tag. So everyday you can see what pages have been unearthed by the wisdom of the web. So it's a great site.

So now we have a reason to tag. Were getting great social benefit from it. And likewise theres a site called flickr, which is flicker but without the "e", where you can upload photos, and you can see other peoples and they can see yours…. And you can look at "webcred" not "webcrud" and see all the photos people have uploaded. And they're tagged. And maybe someone has a sense of humor and uploads a photo of a goat, or somebody eating kittens, and tags it "webcred", but that's the web. Likewise you can subscribe to that. I subscribe to the "Iraq" tag at flickr and you get phenomenal, you get pictures that you won't see anywhere else that are related to Iraq. So now we have a reason to tag. And the idea behind it – and I think this is not entirely right – the idea is that its working because these sites give us selfish reasons to tag. So I tag in del.icio.us because it enables me to organize my own stuff. And out of this magically comes a social benefit. Which to a large degree it true. We do know that people are hugely resistant to tagging unless they're given an immediate benefit from doing so. And I think the reason that's not quite true is that at least some of us – and I speak for myself but I suspect its more than just me – when we tag, we are aware that we are engaging in a social act. And so we tag not only thinking about how other people are going to find it, but we tag also because we want to build this thing. This is something we're doing together. And if we do it, we do it for ourselves, sure, but we also do it because we're building something together that is of greater value than the value that any one of us gets out of it on our own. So if that's the case – and im pretty sure that it is the case – then what were doing is building in flickr and del.icio.us, and technorati, which indexes weblogs and started noticing and indexing the tags in flickr and in del.icio.us and in weblogs as well. We're beginning to see applications that are taking advantage of this.

So we're building a thing that's a layer of meaning on top of the web that wasn't there before that's purely human, its humans typing in tags that mean something to them. Its an absolutely human layer. We're going from trees that are carefully organized, that you have to figure out, ok, which category that's already been made by somebody else does this fit into. That would be the Dewey decimal system at del.icio.us or at flickr. Were going from that to saying, well, what's the best human way of making sense of this. I'll call this Iraq. I'll call it Ghana, I'll call this Africa, I'll call it middle east, whatever. I will do that. The result is we're going from taxonomic trees and we're going to piles of leaves.

[voice: and you can multiply tag something]

And you can multiply tag something so that there um, which means you can actually have two different social groups in mind, or two different contexts in which this might want to be found. We're way at the beginning of this.

[voice: you don't have to decide what's the best]

Even you don't have to decide whats the best, much less think that oh, Joshua Schachter, the new Dewey, has decided. Joshua Schachter has not done that. We will decide. So we're building this layer of leaves that we will figure out later how to get value from. We're already starting to. Technorati is one of the first apps to do that. People are going to figure out amazing applications. This is a new layer of infrastructure just ripe for innovation.

By the way I think that one of the things this means for journalism and the media is, um, the notion of what counts as a story is something that the media, necessarily, had to decide. Limited resources internally, limited attention, limited paper, limit only one front page. The media has decided whats a story. Now were going to be in a position that anybody can decide whats a story. Even multiply. You can tag it multiply.

Ok so that's that. Now I want to talk about ethics, as a philosophical ethics. Not actually useful or interesting ethics.

I used to teach many many years ago, I used to teach philosophy. And I'd either teach intro or occasionally philosophy of morality, and I found it incredibly frustrating. Because the normal way that you teach philosophy of ethics, and taking these courses you probably will agree with this, what happens is you give students a set of the most difficult ethical problems that civilization has ever faced. So lets talk about ethics and try to figure out what makes something moral or ethical. So what do you think about – what do you think about abortion. You have to pick issues in which you know there are two sides and are never going to get resolved. How bout capital punishment. And then you go on to, if you're in a lifeboat, who is the first one you eat? [l]

And not only that, if a student starts to come up with an actual answer and get resolved about it, your job as a teacher – as a philosophy teacher – is to unhorse her. To make sure that you say that's actually very interesting but did you think of… and you knock ‘em off. And as a result, students go through your course and they're very good at doing sort of "meta" morality, but they come out of it convinced that there's no point in talking about morality because nothing's right. And they become relativists and the world goes to hell.

It's a terrible idea… and I didn't get tenure because I wasn't doing it right.

So when philosophers look at the questions of morality they generally actually don't give a rat's ass about actual problems like abortion or capital punishment or anything else. They're interested in a much harder problem, I guess, which is that moral statements have peculiar force that factual statements don't. so a factual statement about the world that's factual, if you believe it, that's fine. A statement that has an "ought" in it – you ought to do this, you ought to do that, if you believe it and you don't do that then you don't really believe it. So some compelling power in "ought" statements. And if you're going to study philosophy of morality you've got to figure out where that comes from. This will be very fast, don't worry. You remember your freshman philosophy as I start, there are basically two tracks through this. One is to say that moral statements get their power from principles. You establish a set of principles and you apply cases to them and figure out what to do. The other track is to say, well to hell with principles, what counts is consequences. I don't care about principles I want to make the world have more happiness and less misery. And so you get consequentialist philosophies like utilitarianism. So what you should understand about the philosophy profession, is that the way to succeed in it is to come up with a meme, an idea, that you can market and brand. It becomes your brand. You get one idea and then for the rest of your life you go to conferences and defend it. There's no possibility that you will ever change your mind. No professional philosopher has ever changed her mind. It doesn't happen.

Maybe occasionally. By the way this is not true for the really important philosophers of the day, but for academic philosophers of the sort that I was heading for, that's the marketing campaign. So. It seemed to me that my idea was going to be that this way of proceeding is in fact wrong. That when you're trying to figure out, what's either, take the example of consequentialist philosophy like utilitarianism. And what you do with teachers is the same thing you do when you're thinking through it, which is you say, ok, utilitarianism says that the way to the most happiness, that's what you ought to do. Ok, so that works pretty well. Because that means you should do these things and not that things. But when you're teaching you say, but don't get settled on that, kids, - because you might actually come out knowing how to be moral - Im going to give you a case where utilitarianism doesn't work. And the case typically is some town where if you hang a guy, the guy's pretty unhappy. The guy's happiness level definitely goes down. The town's happiness goes up sufficiently that the guy's unhappiness is overwhelmed. And you say to your students, there's your utilitarianism, huh, do you still agree? And they say oh no there must be something wrong with utilitarianism if it allows such an injustice. And that's correct and then you go forward from there. So what's happened in this moral reasoning? What's happened is, you see how the principle or the consequentialist thing buckets acts. You come up with some acts and you see, does this sort things correctly? So I guess I'm back at taxonomy. does it put the bad acts into the bad bucket and the good acts into the good bucket. And if it doesn't you throw out the principle. Right? Which means you already have a sense of whats right and wrong. You have to, otherwise you cant tell if your principles are working so you have to have a sense of what's right and wrong. So the wrong way to go with this is to say therefore trust your intuition. Because we know Nazis have very strong intuition about what's right and wrong. So that can't be correct and its not what I'm trying to say. So I'm going to be much vaguer than that.

It seemed to me that there's a bit more that we can say about how we get this initial sense of how we bucket things into what's good and bad. That hanging people is generally a bad thing, I'm not going to argue about it. Or if you're sitting in a rocking chair, and you rock back and your dogs tail is under it and your dog screeches, you rock forward. And I don't really want to argue about that. That's my bucket. Ok? And if you don't see that then I'm running away from you very quickly. So we already have some sense of what the buckets are, and I don't think its merely intuition. I think there's something else you can say about it which is something like – and I'm not going to put this very well – but something like sympathy, something like empathy. Although I actually like sympathy better because I actually don't think it's the case I don't think that I have to put myself into the dog's mind. We don't have to do that. I think its more like sympathy in the sense that its turning towards a shared world with somebody else, and recognizing that that other person matters. And that the world matters .i think its basically as simple as that. And so it's the ability to think the way another person does, and not just to think because this is not intellectual activity – but to care about the world in the same way that other person does. Which more or less means to me that the world can be characterized as a place of caring. A place that we care about and care about with others. This is all cribbed from martin Heidegger by the way. Who was a nazi. So I might as well sit down. …

So theres this guy Richard Rorty who is one of the greats – Richard Rorty wooow woooo – whose just a wonderful writer and wonderful thinker. And he says something that's really interesting I think about this. He says historically we've looked initially to religion as our authority for morality. And then we looked to philosophy, believe it or not, as our authority for morality. And now we look to novels, and that this is a good thing. Because in novels we see the world – and not just see it, we care about the world, in a way that it matters to somebody else. And this is how we work out our moral issues now. And that's proper because at the root of morality is this sympathy. This shared caring. So it's a good thing. He's not saying oh, in stupid American culture its actually novels. He's saying this is an advance. Because it makes morality more of our own, and gets back to what's at heart. Which is a shared world that we care about.

So I'm done with that and now I'm going to talk about blogging. Is this disjointed enough? Each of these should have a little permalink.

We're onto three and I'll have a little wrapup.
[is this small pieces loosely joined?]
It's miscellaneous people hardly not joined. So. Ok so blogging. Perhaps you've heard about this thing all the kids are doing, they're all blogging now?

And I, so , hm. Ok. I understand, and I think this conference has borne witness to the fact that um, blogging looks, you know ive been a journalist and I still occasionally count myself as a journalist so I'm, nevertheless Im speaking as a blogger here. And I understand, I think I understand why blogging looks to journalists and to the media like journalism and like media. But I don't think that's actually, and that's absolutely right for a set of bloggers, some of whom are in the room, some are borderline cases, you know journalist bloggers in the room. But it doesn't look right to the majority of bloggers, it's a mischaracterization. Um. Bloggers look like media because the big bloggers have hundreds of thousands of readers and they are in basically a one-to-many relationship. You have a hundred thousand readers, you can answer some of your email but not all of your email. Its basically one to many. That's what the media, that's the role the media is in, so yeah. That's – im going to put my fingers together – that' s that much of the blogosphere. And the rest of the blogs – I mean were talking about a couple hundred people here - the rest of the blosphere, the other 5 to 10 million already, has nothing to do with that. Something else is going on. So I want to talk about that for a little bit.

Um, blogs matter because they have a URL. They have a permanent web address. And that means, you know so often on the internet or in technology, in particular on the internet because of the social effects, a little tiny thing makes a huge difference. So this is a little thing that weblogs have a permanent web address. Because what that does for them is it gives them a place, it gives them permanence. So we can keep going back to them and learn about the person. Almost everything in my opinion that's distinct and valuable about weblogs has to do with the fact that they're a place. A permanent place. Because at that permanent place we build public selves. Because I, you know, my weblog is my web presence. It is who I am on the web. Its not, its not my journal. Ive written journals, I still write a newsletter. Its different. My weblog is me. And that's why I care about it. Its all anybody knows about me on the web. Its not me expressing myself, its me on the web. Its myself. Im writing myself into existence. As you all are who are bloggers. Every day. And you do it over time. And I get to know the people I'm reading. Because I'm reading them writing themselves into existence over time. Really important, I think, important thing to keep in mind is that we're writing ourselves into existence but we're also writing badly.

Now. Many of us are good writers. That's not what I'm trying to say. What im trying to say is that we write so quickly – because that's another part of weblogging, you do it every day or you do it ten times a day. If you just do it once a week its only a borderline. Its not a good example of a weblog, that's all I'll say. We're writing quickly. And if you're the type of person who needs to have yourself in public be so perfected, so rewritten, that you cant let it go until its been not only spellchecked but edited and sent through the fact checkers and then re-written and perfected the way we like to do in print – and I certainly do – if that's the type of person you are on your weblog, you can't write a weblog. You can't do it, you can post some stuff sure but youre not going to be able to engage in the conversations because its going to pass you by. Youre going to be revising the revision of your revision and its going to be three weeks later. You cant participate in the live of the blogosphere, which is one of conversation, back and forth.

So writing quickly does a couple of things. Because were writing less formally with less care, we expose more of ourselves. It's a less protected form of writing, more personally visible. Second of all, and I know that for example Rebecca may have a good chuckle when I say this, but it encourages at some level, it encourages an ethos of forgiveness.

Now the blogosphere occasionally like this week is not a model of forgiveness. I will admit that. Its been a tough week on the blogosphere. But there's a different level of forgiveness. That is when you read a weblog generally you don't write to the blogger and say ooh you made a spelling error ahahahaha. If that's how youre going to be, you can't read weblogs. Theres going to be none left. So have to be, theres an ethos of forgiveness at an elementary level. On weblogs. With some exceptions, at some level.

I'm by the way if its not clear I'm not referring to Rebecca because she's an unforgiving person because there has been firestorms around perceived slights that

[voice: just say it, I'm a kitten-eating evil cyborg!]

I have no argument.

So taking back control… in an unbelievably ironic way, my next point is about the value of conversation in weblogs. So I've now taken back control of this conversation.

So these writings are very conversational in the sense that, not only do we have comments, comment sections many of us, but we are frequently in conversation with other webloggers. So we'll say I saw on dave's site, I saw this great post, and write about it, disagree with it, whatever. That's a lot of the lifeblood of, and that's conversation. Slower conversation than at the table but its really important conversation.

So. Somebody mentioned in the pre conference mailings, Herbert Gans? Ok. A couple people. And I'm going to pretend to have read him, because… so he talks about the importance of multi-perspectival news. Beginning of a limerick …[unintelligible]
…..
So I think blogs add something really important to that. Yes, of course multiple perspectives. But were getting something now that we never ever ever had before. Which is not simply multiple perspectives which have always been out there, occasionally we've even been able to aggregate and see them. Now these perspectives are in conversation. Theyre talking with one another. And that is a big big difference. And as a result, when I want to know about some topic I can go to a weblog, start there, follow the links, go off – and I'll never get to all of them but this is an economy of abundance so it doesn't matter. I will find not only just a Buddhist talking about the Dewey decimal system, and a Moslem talking about the Dewey decimal sytem, and whatever whatever whatever. I'll also find all these people talking about it, saying I understand your point or I don't understand your point, I think you're right, I think you're wrong, here's how we view it, why you lying cat-killer, why you genius I love what you're writing. This is perspectives in conversation. And I think for me, this means that for the first time, the heft and value of objectivity which I do not denigrate for a moment – although other moments I certainly would - but not at this moment, that some of the heft and value of objectivity now can be had through multiple subjectivity, through multi-subjectivity which is a little bit different than multi-perspectival news. Cause now we're talking with one another. We haven't had that before. That's new to blogging. So what happens in this blogging world is that we are together building this world of meaning that's shot through with humanness. With human perspective which none of us can escape. As weve all acknowledged today, objectivity is a methodology but it does not get you away from your perspective. It helps, helps to isolate some elements of it. Now were rejoicing in it. Now we're rolling around in it. And blogs help us build this world. A world of human beings, human meaning being built in conversation.

So that's the end of part 3. I want to do a brief part 4 which is what's the formal qualities these things have together. Don't worry this is fast, because I don't have a lot to say.

The first is that what's going on in all three of these areas – in tagging, in taxonomies, in ethics and morality and blogging? I think what were getting is an infusion of human meaning into spheres that formerly were considered to be apart from. And guiding us. Whether it's the structure of knowledge in taxonomies, whether it's the principle standing over us which we must rise up to – but these are not ours, they're principles that are being given to to us, just as Dewey was giving his categories to us, and Aristotle was giving by discerning his categories. These are people who actually in the case of Aristotle was not simply making stuff up he was discerning the categories of the world. But nevertheless, they were not ours. These are the ones, these are the datum, the stuff that's given. And likewise with the media. We have been on couches, we have been sitting on the couch facing forward and it has been given to us. Well that's not going to happen anymore. Were in a world in which we are infusing the world with our meaning. And its incredibly messy, its unbelievably disorganized. And part of it is the disorganization that happens when you're in transition. Of course, we're in transition in all three of these areas, so of course its messy and were going to have conferences where people pretty much understand each other but maybe not entirely. And that's what happens. But I'm not sure that this is a temporary mess. Cause it seems to me that we're building piles of leaves. And these leaves are infused with human meaning. And we want to be able to sort and manage and take these leaves and build them into things we haven't thought of before. These leaves of individual meaning, of points of view, of tags. This is what we're up to. Were engaged in a global project of taking down the trees and rolling in the leaves. And I don't know that at the other side of this transition, where typically things get organized, that we're going to have the same type of organization, but with a different set of meanings in place and a different set of people in place. I don't know if that's the case. I think, maybe, we're going to go through this transition, this messy transition, and its going to be a transition into enormous, chaotic, human, mess. And the world will be so much better off for it. Thanks.