#Instagram

After reading Weinberger’s (2007) statement “that the bigger the mess the more accurate is Flickr’s analysis” (p. 95), I have to disagree based upon my experience with working primarily on Instagram.  Social media has begun a movement to allow people a more simplistic and easier way to search for certain items.  Although it may be considered a quicker way to search by clicking on a hashtagged item, I have rapidly learned that this is not the case. A prime example of what I am referring to is that if you were to search the hashtag “#cats” on Instagram, it would be assumed that you would find predominantly cat images or cat-related images; however, some people may hashtag the word cat which may be referring to someone, an inside joke, or a completely unrelated subject.  While on Instagram, I know of someone who takes photographs and hashtags random, unrelated items so that when a person searches for something such as “#cats” they will find an image of corn because they hashtagged it as a joke.  Unfortunately, for a person who is only interested in looking at cat photographs this will not satisfy their search.  Instagram is not 100% accurate in organizing their information based upon a hashtag.

               Weinberger (2007) strongly believes that “these physical limitations on how we have organized information have not only limited our vision, they have also given the people who control the organization of information more power than those who create the information” (p.89).  Below I have included Instagram’s way of explaining the use of hashtags, but what I noticed and was surprised by was that they admitted the trickiness behind using them.  There are limitations within using this social media outlet and like several other networks, there will always be an organizational control between the creators and the controllers of the actual information.  I cannot completely dismiss that “the bigger the mess the more accurate” because as I read in a Washington Post article (website link below), I realized that the use of hashtags is also an innovative and organized way within our generation allowing an easier way to relay important messages especially for advertising companies.  I have a difficult time deciding whether or not order hides more than it reveals because I am not familiar with all social media outlets and/or search engines.  However, from my experience I think that order does often hide more because there is so much information to go through that the results are endless and may not be in a particularly ordered fashion. 

               The Washington Post quoted Hoffman as saying, “if you want to cut through the clutter and reach young minds then you really need user generated content, you better get people giving you thousands of likes on Facebook or re-tweeting your ad”.  Clutter and disorganization are barriers in to finding the most accurate information.  Weinberger believes that a bigger mess may allow for more accuracy but how is that so between all the clutter and chaos? 

http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-09-13/national/42041231_1_ad-council-federal-government-instagram

Two Heads are Better than One

Weinberger presents Ranganathan as an ambitious and meticulous man who was devoted to finding a classification system fit for his native country, India.  After years and years of using the Dewey Decimal System, Ranganathan came to the conclusion that Dewey was set on Christian relevancy excluding other religions and beliefs.  Similar to Dewey, Ranganathan’s eagerness to discover a new classification system left room for many improvements.  I believe that his “five laws of library science” have some substance yet I find one to be bothersome.  Ranganathan’s list is as followed:

               Books are for use.

               Every reader his/her books.

               Every book its readers.

               Save the time of the reader; save the time of the library staff.

               The library is a growing organism. (p. 79)

Personally, his fourth law, “Save the time of the reader; save the time of the library staff” takes away the idea that librarians and their staff dedicate their time day in and day out to their patrons, so the idea of saving time of the library staff remains a bit confusing to me. 

               Ranganathan’s Colon Classification, so appropriately named, seems to yet again stray away from a more detailed structure similar to Dewey.  The five components within this classification include; “personality, matter, energy, space, and time” (p. 80).  What Ranganthan does do opposed to Dewey is take it a deeper by adding values making the classifications more flexible.  I am impressed that with someone who did not wish to become a librarian dedicated his career path towards dismissing and/or adding on the Dewey Decimal System.  I am hesistant to believe that his system was any better than Dewey’s because what they both had in common was that they did not think of any type of advancements within their arena and also they focused predominantly on what affected their environment and not others. 

               After reading Weinberger’s take on Ranganathan as the equivalent of Darwin for Dewey I had to investigate more of how Dewey may have taken Ranganathan’s work.  I found an incredible audio clip of Ranganathan that may be of interest to some of you regarding Melvil Dewey.  Surprisingly, early on in Ranganathan’s research neither he nor Dewey had crossed paths until he had sent a Dewey his published work containing his “five laws of library science”.  What I gathered from Dewey’s response is that he would not be satisfied or accepting of someone trying to reformat or replace his classification system.  Ranganathan recalls Dewey saying, “It's very dangerous. I have suffered. People attribute all kinds of motives to you. Apart from that, if anything goes wrong, they will pounce upon you. It may cost your appointment. On the other hand, if you use a scheme which is established, which is used everywhere, which is not yours, if anything goes wrong, you will go scot free. Why do you think of doing another scheme of classification?"  This very idea made me ponder that there will never be a time where we are all in agreement with a system of classification.  While I understand Dewey’s concerns that there will always be negative feedback, I can also take away that there may have been a detest for someone whose classification system may overtake his somewhat outdated method.   

I highly recommend listening to the audio (the first few seconds are very noisy) while reading the transcript that our very own Weinberger transcribed in 2005.  I think that this interview with Ranganathan portrays a need for collaboration for a new system of classification.  Two heads may have been better than one in this quest for a new classification system. 

              

http://www.miskatonic.org/files/ranganathan-on-dewey.mp3

http://www.hyperorg.com/misc/ranganathan_on_dewey_transcript.html (Weinberger’s transcript)

Don't Disregard Dewey

            Weinberger’s chapter on “The Geography of Knowledge” focuses in on my opinion the more negatively related reactions to the Dewey Decimal System.  I was somewhat surprised by how several librarians are known, according to Weinberger, to roll their eyes at this somewhat outdated classification system.  Personally, I remember how organized and easy it was to understand where books were located due to the set-up of certain books.  Until now, I did not see some of these categories as being problematic such as “Philosophy and Psychology”.  Prior to reading this chapter, I would not find this to be an issue until further investigation as to why it poses so many issues to the average patron and/or librarian.  Psychology and Philosophy are considered to some, to be polar opposites thus causing a need to be separated categorically.  While I understand that this classification may be considered outdated to some, is it possible that his arrangement of categories can be used methodically and effectively in the 21^st century without over-analyzing the system to the point of disregarding it?  It seems to me, that as time goes on, it tends to be our goal to think of bigger and better ways to organize which may lead us to neglect past methods that have worked for decades.  I believe that after reading this chapter, I now have a new found respect for Melvil Dewey’s classification which has been the building blocks to the Library of Congress Classification.  While I appreciate Dewey’s classification based off the world, which at the time created was a popular idea, I do realize now it is outdated which has led to a more modern classification system that is easier to understand.  I am stuck in the middle of appreciating the early beginning of the Dewey Decimal System and its relationship to the foundations of studies at the time; however future foundations were not anticipated thus were categorized based solely on the present. 

            As for the TEDtalk video we watched in class on Wednesday, it changed my opinion on the website significantly.  I was one of the students who had been sworn off of Wikipedia by nearly 95% of my teachers since I was in grade school.  What I did not realize was the amount of effort and security placed within this online encyclopedia.  It is obvious that there are flaws in nearly every online source, but it seems apparent that Jimmy Wales understood these negative connotations associated with the Internet, and made it a mission to securely submit information.  I was astonished by his truthfulness behind an individual’s ability to submit false information but then the fast turnaround rate which was impressive.  His example regarding the Kerry and Bush campaign and how he had locked out people from submitting either untruthful text or “vandalizing” the page shows the importance of validity behind Wikipedia.  I have found that because of his security measures of preventing vandalism on pages, that Wikipedia is more accurate than I had assumed in the first place.  Prior to listening to Wales speak about this universal encyclopedia, I had found it to be a website based upon inaccurate information in which no one analyzed for truthfulness and facts.  I believe that by watching this video and looking up random pages after class, I was fascinated by the reliability after fact checking through other sources.   

Alphabetical Versus Topical

     Prior to reading Weinberger’s chapter on “Alphabetization and its Discontents”, I had found myself looking at the alphabet as the building blocks to our childhood.  As children, it is one of the most basic concepts we learn growing up and typically no one looks up at their parent and asks why it is organized in this fashion.  Personally, I believe that the use of the alphabet is still relevant in our daily lives whether it is how a class roster is listed or the example they gave about loading a bus alphabetically opposed to using a person’s race.  On the other hand Charles Luthy and Mortimer Adler’s approach that the alphabet is considered arbitrary challenges my viewpoint on the subject.  Adler’s “alphabetiasis” and eagerness to change the organization of the Encyclopaedia Britannica was a result of his opinion that by forfeiting to the simplistic organization of the alphabet was an “evasion of intellectual responsibility” (Weinberger, 2007). Unfortunately for Adler, while his topical organization was thought-provoking and enticing, the realization that not one topically organized encyclopedia had succeeded was enough of a determining factor for the chairman of the board who decided to continue with an alphabetical organization of the Britannica.  

     Dmitrii Ivanovich Mendeleev had the task of trying to organize the elements in a way in which people would understand the relationships between one element and the next.  Once Mendeleev found a pattern based upon shared properties and relationships he organized them into the widely known periodic table of elements.  This widely used table is organized based on the close relationships and connections of surrounding elements opposed to an alphabetical table. 

     While I am an advocate for alphabetization, I understand the importance of organizing by relationships, and the periodic table is one of these great examples.  Similar to the periodic table, I thought about how our libraries and even book stores are organized.  If a student were to be purchasing an English book for class they would go to the English section which may then be organized by course.  However, imagine if the book store, similar to the library were not organized by subjects or topics but instead alphabetically.  If you were searching for “Beowulf” for your Chaucer course and then for the same class needed to purchase “The House of Fame”, you would be searching in various sections of the store opposed to the more topical route of organization. 

     Adler, Luthy, and even Mendeleev were not around to see or understand how organization may have been handled digitally.  I thoroughly believe that they would be impressed or at least intrigued by the various ways we have found ourselves organizing different items.  Google for example, may been a search engine they would find to be beneficial due to capabilities of finding the most relevant answer upon reviews and other searches opposed to alphabetically.  When Adler said “inherent in all things to be learned we should be able to find inner connections”, I believe he left us with the idea that connecting relationships allow us to better understand opposed to accepting an impulsive desire to organize in a considerably easy method such as the alphabet.  Weinberger has left me with a new appreciation for topical organization but also the understanding that our alphabet which some may consider outdated, is still as important as it was hundreds of years ago.  

There is No One Way

Kevin Kelly who was featured in TEDTalk stressed the importance of how we as humans “have to get better in believing in the impossible”.  Librarianship has come an incredibly long way from the card catalog to an overwhelming amount of online databases.  The web has increased our ability to create, locate, and search the various avenues of the everyday library; however, he does not fail to mention that there are consequences of our usage of the web.  Three consequences he focused in on included embodiment, restructure, and co-dependency.  Co-dependency seems to be one of the largest of the three issues for the simple reason that patrons and/or librarians may depend on the Web’s answers opposed to any further investigation.  Kelly mentions a funny yet serious statement about when we do not know an answer to something that the first thing we do is “Google it”.  Unfortunately, I have found myself to be among the millions of people who goes straight to Google instead of an old-fashioned encyclopedia, dictionary, or other type of physical research material.  Years ago, we relied heavily on our own knowledge and ability to research answers.  Now there are people who consider researching typing into a search engine and getting thousands of hits in a matter of seconds.

While co-dependency of the Web seems to be a major issue, this gives librarians the opportunity to share the importance of the library system because of the Webs lack of accuracy.  Learning about the continuous technological advances will enable librarians to counter these developments with their knowledge of both technology as well as any “archaic” methods of librarianship.  As current or future librarians we are taught the importance of organization which is something the Internet is lacking. 

The Web while a great asset for many of today’s libraries, still does not take away from the importance of the physicality of organization and the satisfaction from tangible research.  David Weinberger’s chapter “The New Order of Order” illustrates a thought-provoking concept that includes the idea that we have been taught to keep our physical environments in our daily lives to be organized and in order; however, maintaining order in the digital world is much more difficult.  He gives us the example of saving our digital photographs onto the computer versus having them physically.  The issue with trying to organize these photos on the computer is that if you have thousands of photos they are not clearly labeled as to which one is which.  I personally have had an issue with sifting through photographs on the computer opposed to having them physically in front of me.  While some people may use physical storage as a backup, I differ and use the computer as my backup.  A pro to physically storing these photographs is that they are easily accessible to you and that you may go through them at a quicker pace and decipher which ones you like and which you do not.  This may be more difficult on the computer because they are most likely not labeled individually and you would have to look at them one by one.  Weinberger gives this example to shine light on the physical accessibility especially for librarians.  I believe that this example demonstrates why some librarians may favor physical accessibility opposed to the lack of organization in the digital world. 

During our class discussion it became apparent that there are clashing opinions on whether or not the Web is beneficial to librarianship.  It may be the fear of the unknown that is causing this reluctance or the ever so daunting task of having to learn these new and changing technologies.  On the other hand, others are embracing these advancements because it gives us more of an opportunity to engage and further investigate for our patrons and ourselves.  Both Kevin Kelly and David Weinberger allow us to look at both the positive and negative aspects of the Web and our way of digital versus physical organization.