Culminating discussion of Everything is Miscellaneous

[AlexReid]

Here are some key thoughts from the end of Weinberger's book:

Planets are chosen by arbitrary characteristics that are less clear-cut than we'd thought and don't matter anyway. This isn't to say that there are no differences between men and women, that we need never consider race, that puppies are the same as potatoes. Rather, which differences we attend to has everything to do with our history, our language, and our intentions... and even then, the divisions are unlikely to be as clean as essentialism assumed they should be. (221)

What Weinberger is suggesting here is that knowledge is cultural and historical. That means that knowledge is also political and sometimes the site of struggle. This doesn't mean that knowledge isn't "true" in the sense of being accurate or useful. Knowledge is power, as we like to say.

In the world after Enlightenment, the cultural task was to build knowledge. In the miscellaneous world, the task is to build meaning... knowledge is now not our only project or our single highest calling. Making sense of what we know is the broader task, a task for understanding within the infrastructure of meaning. (222)

It's not who is right and who is wrong. It's how different points of view are negotiated, given context, and embodied with passion and interest. Individuals thinking out loud now have weight, and authority and expertise are losing some of their gravity. (230)

I want to comment on these two quotes together. To me they suggest our ethical responsibility in the face of the deluge of information that we face. The second quote gives a sense of the broader task referenced in the first. it is, in my view, a rhetorical task. That means that this work requires artful communication, tactical persuasion, audience awareness, and so on. In a world of endless media, we will compete heavily to get others' attention and shape the communities in which we participate: rhetorical skill is the centerpiece of the attention economy.

A topic is not a domain with edges. It is how passion focuses itself. (230)

I particularly like this final quote. Note how "passion" acts on its own here. It acts through us. Desire is integral to order, even as we recognize that desire often clouds our objectivity. If we think about this in terms of information theory, maintaining order requires energy. Newton's second law of thermodynamics states that the world tends to move toward entropy and chaos. Just think about keeping your room organized. It takes energy, right? Desire is energy. It is will and force. Whether you imagine it originates in your conscious mind (as with free will), in your unconscious (in some psychological scheme), in our culture (as some cultural theorists would argue), or some combination of these, we see here that knowledge not only is power but is also the product of power.

I'd like to hear your thoughts on these ideas or other points of interest in this week's reading.

[Will]

Knowledge is power, yeah, but knowledge is perception. A piece of data can be collected, as an example I will use a completely arbitrary and hypothetical statistic: Country X uses 25% of it's budget on it's military. One person can view the fact as 25% being too high, and that person may or may not be enticed by the data collected. Another person might feel that 25% is way too low, and might want the state to spend more of it's budget on the military. Another person may not even care. So that same fact has 3 or more different ways of being perceived.

My point is that knowledge, facts, is only as good as the student. If the student chooses to ignore the facts then they cannot be helped, and just because someone perceives something differently than you doesn't mean they're wrong. If someone perceived the above fact differently than I, I may consider them stupid, (a person with lack of knowledge), when they just see the fact from a different angle.

[Taylor]

Will, I have never thought about it like that, but you're right that knowledge is perception. I am one of those people who looks at stuff from a different angle than most, and I always say how stupid I am because I do this. Well, I'm obviously not that stupid or else I wouldn't have made it to my senior year in college and been on the deans list several times. So, once again, yes knowledge is perception and facts are only as good as the student. A student may not understand a particular fact so they will perceive it in a way that is different from the next person, therefore the fact is not what is began as. To sum this up, every individual is in fact unique and has and uses their knowledge as they perceive it, which of course will differ from one person to the next.

[Ed Blackford]

A topic is not a domain with edges. It is how passion focuses itself. (230)
I also like this quote. To me a topic is just a starting point for an idea and like you said it takes energy to focus it. Depending on how much energy you put into the topic, it can be something with great knowledge in it or just a plain idea. For example, the topic of the presidential election will be summarized into statements like Obama won because he had more votes than McCain and Obama wants change and McCain wanted to finish the war to some average person living at home. There wasn't really much energy put into the topic so it just stayed "small." Now the people who have a passion for the topic can expand on this, breaking the edges that the person without knowledge on the topic put there. They will analyze different points of view and such and combine/ contrast their ideas with other people who are passionate to create a topic without edges or boundries.

I think Weinberger is trying to tell us not to limit our thinking to just what we know. He want's us to be open minded and think outside the box.

[Brooke Alden Hoffman]

"A topic is not a domain with edges. It is how passion focuses itself. "(230)

I really enjoyed this quotation in particular. It made me think about the energy that I am expelling in my everyday life. Where I focus most of it. Which areas of my life are lacking my attention and which are overwhelmed with love. I started thinking about my classes. About how uneven my attention is distributed across them. Some of my Professors think that I am lazy and disorganized while others would write me a letter of recommendation in a heartbeat. It is all because I am the queen of ignoring what I do not like. If I do not enjoy it, I will go through the motions until it is done. If I do enjoy it, I want it to be good. If I am writing a piece on my life I am going to put all of my energy into it. I am going to think about that piece day and night. I am going to revise it over and over again. I will think about it while I am at dance practice. I will be thinking about it when I cross the street. I will be thinking about it when I am supposed to be learning french and I will be thinking about it during the Ellen Degeneres Show. That piece will mean a lot to me, and other areas of my life will suffer for it's success. But I am a writer, and if that is what I am going to call myself, then I want to produce writing that deserves the title. I think that many people feel that way; ranking the tasks they have laid out for them in order of importance and tending to them accordingly. However, I wish that I was a jack of all trades, but for some reason unknown to me, I find myself making empty promises to become more efficient all of the time. And my passion is focused on what is most important in my eyes.

[Lauren]

The thought that "individuals are now thinking out loud now have weight, and authority and expertise are losing some of their gravity" I believe is taking affect because these individuals now have the proper platform to have their voice be heard. Through the internet, and blogs, and the process of making websites and so on, anyone with an opinion can have their voice be heard through their on digital site. If one is passionate enough to go through the creation of their own platform then they can speak about almost anything that inspires them. I believe that knowledge is strongly based on passion. If you have a passion for making yourself better and more equipped for your future, then you will have a passion for learning and therefore a passion for achieving some sort of higher education. If you truly want to follow through with this passion then you will in the end not only go to class and listen to teacher's and do the work, but you will maybe listen a little harder. You will maybe step outside of the set boundaries to get the best learning experience possible, to in the end better yourself and to shape your future. I believe anything in this world can be achieved if there is passion involved because it is this underlying passion that drives a person to do anything worthwhile in life. It is true that individuals are all unique and will all use the knowledge that they possess in different ways, and I believe these various ways depend on what the passion of the individual is. It is only then that this knowledge will be interpreted to the individual and debated within the individual's mind and in the end, have some meaning to the person.

I can see how desire can at times cloud our objectivity, but it is also the driving force that allows us to look at the bigger picture. Desire like stress I believe is a motivator. It motivates us to pursue our passions, and it motivates us to gain some knowledge about the things that truly matter to the individual. Yes, our culture does in fact shape the basis of our desires and our basis for the knowledge that we would hope to have the drive to acquire but in the end I think that it is all up to the individual to take action. We are at the point now in the world in the aspect of technology that anything is virtually possible. It just depends on what the individual decides to put in; it depends on how much passion and desire an individual has to let their opinion matter to anybody else but themselves.

[Isaac Wheeler]

I agree that I sometimes can take my education for granted. I think it really is overlooked how much knowledge and education can improve a person's life and self. I think the way some classes are designed can make people lazy and going from high school to college can be a shock to a person. Some high school teachers may just push students along to get them out of their class which teaches them nothing.

College isn't required which I find interesting that so many people don't try or complain about having to go to college. This is something that people should be doing for themselves and I think it is being pushed more and more that people attend college. The educational opportunities are really what separates our country from others and opportunities can be unlimited if people apply themselves.