It's a big world

My office is on the third floor of a library. In my lazier moments—which arrive with increasing frequency—I wait for the lift, next to which hangs a poster of this eye-grabbing photomicrograph. Written above the image is a rather bold statement:

It's a big world. We've organized it.

The "We" is the OCLC, who own the rights to the Dewey Decimal Classification system. Now we should be grateful, right?

Well, David Weinberger is not so sure. On All Things Considered he says the problem with attempts by well-meaning authorities to organise information is one of context:

What something is about depends on who is looking.

Tagging, Weinberger argues, accomodates multi-subjectivity by empowering the "…readers to decide what something is about." The big lesson, Weinberger concludes, is that:

…we no longer have to act as if there's only one right way of understanding everything, or that authors and other authorities are the best judges of what things are about.