Blog #2: Chapters 1 and 2

To me, the main point Weinberger is trying to make is that we have exited the realm of the physical, the paper medium. Atoms are limited; digital organization is better in every way. "We can confront the miscellaneous directly in all its unfulfilled glory" (22) is sort of the thesis of the first chapter in that it revels in the miscellany of the new digital order. It praises the digital and how being miscellaneous is better than the limited structures of organization we used previously. Digitized access to things makes for a far more wholesome experience when it comes to the hunt for information. The third order of order removes the barriers we've seen previously.

One thing that I've personally pulled lots of hairs out over keeping organized is my music library. I've labored away so many tedious hours of my life making sure I have incredible, instant, and very "third-order" access to my own musical collection. Interestingly enough, while the physical medium may have been almost completely phased out by the "beauty" of the digital that Weinberger is so quick to put on a pedestal, it has so many issues. The biggest qualm I've had with the replacement of physical data with digital data is that the platform we access and centralize our digital data with, the computer, is very unstable. Far, far too many times has some virus, upgrade, server failure, or other issue with the inherent fragility of computers caused me to lose access to my entire collection of music. Viruses rendering my system unstable cause me to format my hard drive, bam there goes my music. Getting a new laptop for my birthday causes the issue of having to transfer 17 GB of data, re-organize and re-sync it with an entirely new machine. The unfortunate reality of iTunes is that it tends to format files so that they don't take their metadata with them from place to place unless you continue to use iTunes, etc. etc. I could discuss the merits of various music players at length but that's irrelevant; I've unfortunately coordinated my entire music library around the familiar iTunes platform and that makes it a gigantic pain to move digital data from machine to machine, hard drive wipe to hard drive wipe. Especially when the alternative is to re-rip over 100 different CDs and deal with tagging metadata on all of it. It's quite a pain.

Thus the physical realm, with its limitations, has its advantages. Though Weinberger argues up a good storm for bits vs. atoms, I'm likened to the discussions in my DTC 375 class of the advent of the camera and how there was quite a movement around it. The idea was floating around that it was this new way to capture reality far better than paintings or art ever could and that art was thus invalidated; but it remains. As do our physical libraries and CD collections. Data is not the king, even in all the glory of the "unfulfilled glory" of the miscellaneous.