Some people believe that there is an order to the universe which has escaped us until the creation of the Internet.
They believe that the Internet forms a "great chain of being" among all users that can reveal ancient mysteries within the random data. All it takes is the right algorithm to see through the data to find the answer to life, the universe and everything.
And the data creators are part of this chain: the lowly bloggers are part of this chain.
Huh, didn't you hear me? I'm a creator, dammit! I can help to discover the truth to life, the universe and everything. We create the data which reveals the truth, order through chaos.
But didn't someone once say that a monkey typing infinitely will eventually type all of Shakespeare's works? I guess the math is here.
So now I'm a monkey?
The arbitrary and random nature of the Internet becomes ordered through agreement. If we agree that something is important, it becomes important.
I've been blogging for a few months and I've had visits from lots of people, but only a few come back. Even though I have a catchy name that gets lots of random search hits, only a few come back. So out of the chaos of the Internet, some order has formed. A few people have agreed that this site has some use. If I were to use math to link and analyze visits, I might calculate some social network created by this site. And if I could define this site, I could form a theory about that network and maybe even form some conclusion. But I would need lots more data. So I guess I need a catchier name. The.monkey.effing.librarian.
But anyway, I'm reading that book, Everything is Miscellaneous, and of course, I can't read one sentence without thinking some thought that gets me sidetracked. And here are the things that I thought about after one or two chapters:
(from Chapter 2)
Alphabetization is useful because it is ordered: A comes first. So I know that when I park my car in the Mickey lot, that after I enjoy a day of waiting on long lines for $75, and I go out to not find my car for a half an hour, that Mickey will come after Donald and Goofy, but before Minnie. Other than that, alphabetization has no real meaning. But some people mistakenly attribute an importance and value to each letter which corresponds to a number. A is better than B because it comes before B. But that value is not supported by the real relationship between A and B.
For the same reason, Dewey is useful because it defines an order. Someone might argue that 297.122 is less important to Dewey than number 220 because it has more numbers after the decimal, because 220 is a higher-order number, but that's assigning a value to the numbers that isn't part of their original intent. Within the Dewey system, the number defines a location, not a high-low value. And it's just as easy for me to forget a 3-digit number as a 7-digit one with several people asking me for help on my way through the stacks, so shorter numbers aren't always better.
My mom used to have an arbitrary way of organizing canned goods: all the corn went together, including the creamed corn and even the succotash because it has corn; the carrots went by themselves; and all the green vegetables went together even if the green beans were French cut or regular. But no one tried to change it because we knew where things were. Why should the carrots get room all to themselves? Didn't matter. You learned the system if you didn't want lima beans.
People want order. That's why people love tagging on LibraryThing; because most fiction was never given subjects or if given subjects, given bad subjects: you might see Flowers in the Attic given the subject, "Families - Fiction" and nothing else. So people are out there attempting to create order by filling the Internet with data.
So we need to keep blogging until such time that order is discovered, when it reveals itself to be a glorious and harmonious grand, unifying truth.
And then the planet will explode.
