Being-on-the-web: Weinberger's "infrastructure of meaning"

Writing about the web is increasingly “post-utopianist” meaning that it doesn’t expressly argue for the essential goodness of the web; doesn’t assume we’ve no real responsibilities as designers and consumers; and doesn’t assume that people are always nice or positively prosocial in their behavior online. Writers like Cass Sunnstein and Clay Shirky are at least trying to get past the breathlessness of the early days of communitarian-turned-capitalist web boosterism to a more realistic – but still hopeful – place. This is great and it’s exactly what was needed.

Dystopianism – the view that the web is essentially for the worse – is clearly the wrong reaction to utopianism. But if you can get past the panicky, paternalist fist-shaking and general curmudgeonliness of a lot of the dystopianist writing, their arguments tend to be of two types: appeals to popular, romantically conservative conceptions of individuality, creativity and culture or arguments showing that the boosters’ optimism is actually misplaced and the web doesn’t work the way they claim. The latter arguments are actually helpful, just showing that, if you’re attempting to draw evaluative conclusions from theoretical arguments, you can’t simply rely on your assumptions about what we all consider positive. For example, you can’t just assume that removing barriers to “publication” is good in and of itself, regardless of whether or not this is an increase in overall “freedom.” Some might not like the idea that there’s no longer a practically imposed institutional filter on publication because it results in enormous choice and verity problems. In addition, we’ve no real proof – plus a lot of theoretical objections and some disconfirming experimental data – that the web’s structural “solutions” to the problems of choice and truth actually work.

The other dystopian “arguments,” however, tend to be limited to dismayed hand wringing and unkind caricature about the state of culture, creativity and taste. So ultimately, the dystopianist/utopianist battle boils down to competing intuitions about what we should value and what we’re giving up or gaining by embracing this new and powerful medium. David Wienberger, a brilliant and proud utopianist, casts this battle in political terms as conservative dystopianists versus liberal utopianists. Of course, analogizing to a dichotomy in another domain doesn’t really clear things up. It’s a rhetorical move trying to get you to cast your lot either with the progressive forces of liberalism (yay!) or with the regressive deadweight of conservativism (boo!). But along the way he throws a third type into the mix, realists. He defines realists as the pragmatists in the middle, rational, level-headed and myopically obsessed with facts, data and history, i.e. boring. Supposedly, the realists feel that the web isn’t that different from other media, that the rhetoric on either side is hysterical and needlessly sensational. We just need to step back and think rationally about this new medium.

Weinberger thinks that the realists are valuable but essentially wrong about the web. That is, they’re wrong about the essence of the web, which is totally different and wholly revolutionary. Realists’ calmly rational judgment of its potential and possibilities will only blind us to its true innovative potential in the long run. For example, thinking of, judging or predicting the web’s impact and future in terms of past media may keep us locked in old patterns and thus foreclose potentially valuable new paths. So realists are valuable advisors and functionaries, but they shouldn’t be allowed to steer the ship or even navigate. After all, you’ll never discover new worlds by reading old maps... or something like that.

Anyway, if we define the realist as somebody who feels that the rhetoric on either side is overheated, that the whole debate needs a dose of reality and that the web isn’t really all that different or revolutionary, then I’m clearly not a realist. The web is indeed different in many respects, mainly in its decentralized structure, wickedly low entry cost and sudden ubiquity. I do think we need a dose of reality, but not in the way Weinberger’s realist thinks. Sure, reality is about facts, a claim most utopianists belittle via scare quotes, but these are facts about mechanisms – what structures foster and propagate knowledge, truth and quality and what we can expect from interacting agents, etc. – and not necessarily facts about history, which really are subject to biased “framing narratives.”

Finally, both utopianists and dystopianists agree that the web is revolutionary, but the former consider it a positive revolution, while the latter consider it negative. The realists, in contrast, don’t think it’s revolutionary at all, but rather more of the same only louder. Unlike Weinberger’s realists, I think the the web is revolutionary, but I use this word advisedly and without the attached evaluation, good or bad. Normatively evaluating a fact is clearly a case of interpretation, it’s identifying a fact as good or bad according to some evaluative scheme. It’s the interpretation that makes the difference. So what’s Weinberger’s interpretation?

Like Shirky, Weinberger analogizes the web revolution to the socio-cultural impact of the printing press or rather moveable type. Just as the printing press led not only to affordable books but also the dissolution of old social/labor orders and the growth of a literate, educated public, so too the web is leading to a boom in bottom-up social organization, individual creation and the general overthrow of old-guard cultural gatekeepers and entrenched hierarchies.

Now, Weinberger and Shirky, never tell us how to define institutions (or norms, conventions, etc.) – the socio-cultural structures overthrown by these revolutions – but to me they’re just self-reinforcing patterns of conditioned preferences and expectations structuring our repeated interactions. They aren’t etched in stone or handed down from on high. Rather they are slowly coordinated upon by generations of locally interacting humans. Thus, they’re contingently coordinated upon interaction and preference structures suited to the circumstances in which they developed. Change the situation or circumstances, and there will be pressure to change the institutions, norms, etc. If the situation changes radically, they will crumble and chaos will ensue, lasting just until new institutions and norms are either coordinated upon or imposed. This is a revolution.

But Weinberger in particular – echoing Marshall McLuhan, Walter J. Ong and my old teacher Greg Ulmer among others – likes to point out that media transform our ways of thinking, thus a revolutionary medium will radically change us. I agree, but only insofar as new media destroy old and foster new norms, conventions and institutions of creation and consumption. It’s the old and new norms and institutions that structure our interactions, inform our preferences and cement our expectations. So we agree on a lot, but notice, we’ve yet to see anything in this revolution that would lead us to evaluate it positively, i.e. as a utopian revolution (conservative old dystopianists, on the other hand, started frowning the second institutions felt pressure). Disruption, difference and impact don’t necessarily equal good. So how does Weinberger get from revolution to positive evolution?

Well, I can’t definitively say, but there are hints throughout his writing. Take this passage:

...Access to printed books gave many more people access to knowledge, changed the economics of knowledge, undermined institutions that were premised on knowledge being scarce and difficult to find, altered the nature and role of expertise, and established the idea that knowledge is capable of being chunked into stable topics. These in turn affected our ideas about what it means to be a human and to be human together. But these are exactly the domains within which the Web is bringing change. Indeed, it is altering not just the content of knowledge but our sense of how ideas go together, for the Web is first and foremost about connections.

And in what way is it altering “our sense of how ideas go together?” In his wickedly clever Everything is Miscellaneous Weinberger claims that the web is an “infrastructure of meaning” as opposed to just stodgy old knowledge. He trots out the philosopher, Nazi and all around dour grump Martin Heidegger to explain his notion of meaning. Basically, it comes down to the humanly grounded, intricately woven, real-world web of warm significance that we actually live in daily as opposed to the cold, objectified, brutally subdivided grid of "official" knowledge. Just as printing initiated a revolution that separated knowledge from the lived world and brought us the evils of categorization, specialization and scientism, so the web – with its personalizing “tags” and ability to instantly pair even the most unlikely contents regardless of official taxonomies – is initiating a sort of counter-revolution in which content and knowledge are re-imbued with subtle, non-taxonomic human significance. Thus, the web – particularly the user-enhanced, user-responsive (if jargony) “Web 2.0” – is an “infrastructure of meaning” insofar as the thickening accretion of human metadata on boundlessly linkable content makes it implicitly available for officially unintended but humanly significant purposes.

So, the foundation of his normative claim that the web is essentially for the best seems to be the idea that it’s instituting a new, souped-up version of the old pre-printing press, pre-Enlightenment notion of situated and subtle human – as opposed to "rational" or scientific – knowledge. The web reclaims knowledge from the alienating pretensions of science, reason and “rationality.”

Versions of this idea have been around for a while. As Weinberger mentions, McLuhan argued for the human impact of media, as did the Jesuit scholar Walter J. Ong. Ong’s book Orality and Literacy was expressly devoted to the cognitive, epistemic and human impact of media types. You could interpret Michel Foucault’s claim that knowledge structures are imposed power structures as a version as well. I even agree with part of Weinberger’s application of it to the web: the web really is revolutionary in the extent to which it puts knowledge at people’s fingertips and allows them to find, add to, connect and forward it at will. And this is a far more human – essentially human – way of interacting with and handling knowledge.

I just don’t agree that the “human” way is necessarily good. It could be great, leading to broader minds and deeper understanding of the world and ourselves. Or it could lead to increasing factionalization, self-absorption and distrust. After all, research suggests that, left to our own devices, people – humans – only seek out and retain confirmation of previously held opinions. So much so that we often ignore the true in favor of the convenient or comfortable. We’re also significantly biased toward things we’re already familiar with. It’s also unfortunately true that our moderate views tend to become more extreme in the sorts of echo-chambers the previous phenomena set up: seeking out confirmation from like-minded people and sources and the discomfort at differing opinions (justified and reinforced by the ready agreement of our like-minded contacts) tends to make our views ever more entrenched, absolute and resilient against contradictory fact.

Just because people can connect content in wickedly exciting but subtle new ways and access highly specialized information in seconds, that doesn’t mean they will be exposed to a breadth of opinion or even – sadly – the truth. The web, because of its native responsiveness to our individual desires, allows each of us to create a cozy cocoon of confirmation and reinforcement.

But maybe this isn’t all bad by Weinberger’s lights. Weinbereger adores Heidegger’s philosophy. Central to Heidegger’s understanding of meaning is the concept of Being-in-the-world: basically, the idea that all encounters with the world are already infected with our intentions, moods, cultural connotations, etc. and that there is no sense to the traditional notion of a pure object or subject. So meaning is pretty much an inescapable consequence of any encounter with the world. But this also suggests that context – physical, social, cultural and historical – is not only inescapable, but necessary for meaning. Objectivity becomes, literally, the view from nowhere, not just impossible, but unintelligible.

Maybe these cocoons of confirmation – these little webs of shared connotations and self-reinforced absolutist understandings, which I claim are negative aspects of a naturally biased humanity – are really what Heidegger’s beleaguered teacher Edmund Husserl called “lifeworlds:” the necessary and inescapable social, cultural and historical contexts within and through which we experience the world. Maybe so, but the problem is, these life worlds are hermetically sealed wholes of historical and cultural prejudice, incommensurable and unassailable. As Heidegger’s most influential student Hans-Georg Gadamer formulated it, prejudice – the historical, social and cultural “situatedness” we’re born into – is essential to Being-in-the-world. Outside of your lifeworld, your cocoon of prejudice, you simply aren’t... in the big metaphysical sense. Thus primordial prejudice – our cocoon of reinforcing ideas ever ready to disregard inconvenient or inconsistent “facts” – is the foundation of meaning in this Heideggerian sense.

Obviously Heidegger had nothing but disdain for the Enlightenment notions of reason, rationality and truth. It’s easy to see why. By his lights, there’s nothing over top of “Being-in-the-world” or “the lifeworld,” no outside facts to adjudicate between the “meanings” grounded in the various prejudice-composed contexts. The “lifeworld” or “Being-in-the-world” is the only ground of significance. Rationality, reason and science, on the other hand, are about seeking a global foundation (possibly in the real world) for the “intersubjectivity” that Heidegger seems to have thought only inheres in shared cultural, social and historical prejudices or contexts.

So maybe we who are stuck on the old-fashioned liberal hope of finding some common, testable ground of meaning, knowledge and intergroup understanding have it terribly, inhumanly wrong. We shouldn’t think of people’s natural drive to willful ignorance and reinforced, non-verifiable absolutism as an unfortunate legacy of our evolutionary past. They aren’t something that we as designers working in a world that desperately needs people to stop embracing local superstition, prejudice and dangerously out of sync norms have a responsibility to mitigate for the good of humanity. Rather we should just realize that these prejudices are the only foundation of truly human meaning and not pretend that there’s anything outside of them. Maybe this is the way Weinberger intends his “infrastructure of meaning” to be interpreted.

So, back to Weinberger’s utopianism. Remember that utopianism is the idea that the web is essentially good or for the best. Specifically that it’s native capacity to allow users to add metadata to content and make subtle, personal connections and relations is fundamentally and wholly positive. I’ve suggested that certain biases in humans – we only like what we know, we only want to be agreed with, agreement makes our prejudices even stronger and we’ll ignore the truth if it violates either of the first two – mitigate the positive prospects. In other words, because of the way we are, the web alone isn’t going to lead us to the promise land. That said, Weinberger’s rosy optimism seems to make sense only if you choose one of the following two options:

• Ignore the unfortunate facts about humans’ tendency to avoid disconfirmation and neglect what some would call the truth for cognitive comfort and personal consistency.
• Or, as his preferred philosophical tradition might recommend, embrace these tendencies as a prerequisite of authentic, human meaning. It’s not a bug. It’s a feature.

You do either one of those and I could see how Weinberger’s web utopianism might work. Personally, I find neither particularly appealing.

Of course, I’ve fudged along the way. Heidegger wrote extensively about “authenticity” as a refusal to unreflectively live the conventional life your peers demand etc. Also, “Being-in-the-world,” “lifeworlds” and even Gadamer’s prejudice soaked “horizons” aren’t exactly like the little cocoons of auto-agreement people tend to create around themselves and which the web makes ever easier and more complete. But fudging aside, this doesn’t alter the basic thrust of this popular philosophical tradition’s radical perspectivism. I just wanted to investigate whether this could be what Weinberger has in mind given that he probably knows people aren’t as reasonable as we could hope. Finally, it could be that Weinberger is just trying to say that the web provides wicked cool new ways of getting people to content. Which it does. But I think he’s going for something more.

The Miscellany, Nominalism and The Essence of the Web

[NOTE: This version originally appeared on Armchair Media's blog. The more verbose version that was here has been removed... it was a drag.]

Given the tagged, user generated nature of the web today, is Information Architecture a dead practice that just won’t lay down? Are rigid ontologies a crime against the intrinsic nature of content on the web? Do outdated, hierarchical ways of ordering content on the web commit us to stifling and misleadingly authoritative structures that curtail innovation and invention?

David Weinberger seems to think so. He doesn’t like hierarchies, taxonomies or narrow instrumental classifications. His latest book, Everything is Miscellaneous, is devoted to drawing out just how inadequate these structures are when applied to the distributed, messy heap of content on the web. This isn’t a particularly new observation. Clay Shirky has been speaking to this point for years now. The basic idea is that the classificatory structures that we use to deal with the very real constraints of the physical world lend an artificial “essentialist” necessity to our task-based classificatory practices online. Ordering and making sense of the welter of stuff that populates our closets and sciences is necessary given the limitations of the physical world. That doesn’t mean they’re necessarily “true” in some big, extra-systemic sense, however. The need for strict, pre-determined structure is mitigated online because computers are really good at creating ad hoc order out of an undifferentiated mess. Online, not everything needs one and only one place. Acting and designing as if it did at best limits the democratic/utopianist promise of the web and at worst imposes or perpetuates illegitimate power structures. My interest is in what this does to the practice of web design.

First of all, I agree with most of what Weinberger and Shirky say about the changed face of order on the web. The majority of content falls into a miscellany. It’s just a mess of digital artifacts awaiting order. Anyone can throw stuff out there and it doesn’t really matter where it resides. If it has metadata on it or we can read its content, we can find it again and probably even put it to some use for which it was never intended. It's the potential for order that’s important. Designers have been working out the implications of these ideas for years now. Apparently, Weinberger’s book is intended for the decision makers near the top that may not have worked out the implications of ideas like tagging.

A key target of Weinberger and Shirky’s ire are ontologies or data structures intended to explicate the concepts in some domain of knowledge. Ontologies, in the information sciences sense, are the cornerstone of the Semantic Web. Shirky uses the term more broadly, thinking of it in philosophical terms as the sorts of things countenanced by some system, the sorts of things that some domain recognizes as constituents. The claim is that ontologies lead to a species of essentialism, or the world view that everything has some set of properties that uniquely identifies it in all possible situations. Both Shirky and Weinberger spend a lot of their time pointing out the fact that most ontologies are arbitrary and conventional, but that they can give the impression of necessity or self-evidence. For them, different ontologies are just competing webs of more or less useful concepts. In holding this view we can refer to them as nominalists.

My problem with most influential nominalists on this and other points is that, if not read or followed carefully, they can give the impression that there’s no place for local, designed order online at all. In other words, sometimes their fervent tone gives the impression that there’s absolutely no room or reason for islands of structure built from the welter of free form content. In their desire to rout “ontologizing” hierarchies simply on principle, they obscure the fact that a task-based local structure doesn’t automatically engender a totalizing, absolutism. The local structures on most sites are about sense-making and communication, not world-making and dictation. For instance, Flickr, Weinberger’s favorite example isn’t really the free-wheeling heap of free-range content he casts it as. Content enters Flickr neatly, if minimally, categorized (“category” isn’t coextensive with “hierarchy”) by user, camera type, etc. One could almost say that the user provides a loose ontology for Flickr. The user, a sort of default set, is the center of gravity that holds Flickr together; it’s the initial structuring principle that gives the content its potential for further order and defines possible transformations. It’s a wonderfully loose binding, but without this initial act of minimal categorization, the potential for further arbitrary re-ordering is lost. Though Weinberger and Shirky clearly know this, they should probably state it more explicitly as their management level audience may not be in the trenches enough to cut through the polemic and hyperbole.

There’s no such thing as order ex nihilo. Computers are really good at aggregating if they’ve access to some sort of potential ordering mechanism (tags, official metadata, etc.). If it’s text, this could be pure content. If not, we need to attach something, thus Flickr’s initial, user determined set. If we’ve no handle by which to grab the content, it might as well not be there (particularly with images and video). This is not to say that there’s no emergent order, which is a separate issue entirely.

As we’ve been stating for years, Information Architecture in the old fashioned tree-structure sense does seem pretty irrelevant. Definitely so for IA in the grand, Peter Morville sense, in which all sites are trees, everything has one and only one spot and there’s very little cross-linking of paths. Still any structure that gives sense a la Flickr’s implicit categorization is a form of architecture. It’s an ordering principle that somehow sensibly aggregates content on a local scale. So we’ve no longer Information Architecture in which all structures are made from custom built materials. Rather it’s more of an information shanty town in which personal structures are built from the miscellaneous heap of common materials. But the important point is that it’s still architecture, and still reproduces common elements like doors, windows, etc (to stretch the metaphor a little thin). We need pools of order with understandable principles of manipulation that briefly and locally coordinate elements from the miscellany. This point is often obscured in Weinberger’s book and we, as designers, will have to pay the price once it starts to circulate within marketing departments.

And though Weinberger (at least) seems to frown upon instrumental concerns on the web, we tend to have to design sites that people use to do things. At an abstract level, the nature of the miscellaneous mess of content means that it becomes more useful the more content there is and the more it’s tagged. For example, the more people upload and interact with content on Flickr, the better your chance of finding photos tagged “fruitcake” that are actually pictures of fruitcakes. Tagging after all is often more about the tagger than the tagged. Once enough people are doing it, however, the tags start to become useful content locators; at high volumes, idiosyncrasies and bad tags tend to filter out. Unfortunately, this suggests that loose structures, based entirely on tags tend to have an instrumental usefulness that varies with content volume and interaction. The moral: if you’re working on a project with
a smallish expected volume that needs to be useful out of the gate, you may still need to impose a strict categorization scheme in order to meet you goal. This, to Weinberger, is a sin, or at least a backwards looking crime against the essence of the web. At least that’s the impression one gets reading the book. (Shirky takes a more nuanced, “domain of discourse” based approached)

On the ground, designers realize that these quicksilver, local categorizations are the fundamental means by which we define our sites and some of our only means of communication online. They’re a part of the language of the web through which we communicate our clients’ messages. Without these structures, there would be no sites per se, just a grey fog of rootless content awaiting individual requests for order. This can’t be what Weinberger has in mind. Yes, Google is hugely popular. But it’s also a high-level general ordering mechanism and a liminal space intended to get people through it, not to it. The success of Google at what it does does not mean that we should all follow that example. Unless all we want to build from here on out are search engines.

So, we all agree that, in general, top down hierarchies are less and less relevant to a distributed, open access dumping ground like the web. And, of course, nobody really thinks that there’s only one relevant ontology. Ontologies are domain specific and the attributes assumed within them are never intended to be intrinsic to the content. Still, the need for order comes from two directions: the client and the user. Sites are doors into the mass of content, zones of order that communicate in part through the principles they impose on the miscellany. Users don’t yet want to get down to the level of the miscellany. Google, is the closest we like to get: a presentation of an ostensibly ordered set bound together by some minimal user-defined “intension.” The lower level domain-specific sites we generally concern ourselves with usually require a tighter sense of order than something high-level like Google. In general, as domain specificity increases so too the appropriate ordering principles (conventional content breaks, vocabulary, etc.). Users want a certain decrease in uncertainty as they become more specific in their searching behavior, but I agree that they never want its elimination. This is what the new ordering principles are all about. Allowing local order without stripping away the global properties of the miscellany.