Psychology of Social Media Class Week 3 Reflection

In this week, the class moved from the introduction of the social media to the function of it. During a recorded interview with David Weinberger, the author of the book Everything is Miscellaneous, he said that “The solution for too much information is more information.” This statement does not make a lot of sense without understand the basic idea of the orders of information. According to David’s idea that “not everything has its places, we have to get rid of the idea that there is a best way of organizing the world,” human are trapped by our tendency to organize the information only in few ways that we are familiarized and believe that they are the “only” ways to organize information. The professor used photos to illustrate this idea. The traditional way told us to put photos in a chronological order by date. However, such a method makes specific photos extremely difficult to locate. For example, if a person wants to find the photos of him and his girlfriend on a specific beach somewhere around 1980s, he will need to go through all the photos on that year. Nevertheless, if the person tag his photos differently by topics or subjects, it would be a lot easier for him or for anyone in his family to locate a specific photo for hundreds of photos. As the result, it is a better idea to organize things miscellaneously. The professor further used modified movie quotes to express the idea that without modifying information according to the situation, they often look award. For example, in the Disney movie “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”, the famous quote “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?” was originally quote as “Magic Mirror on the Wall, who is the Fairest one of all?” If Disney adopted the original version, this line will be a lot less powerful and memorable. Given the idea that the miscellaneous orders are better, a problem occurred: what could you do to make everything miscellaneous? According to David Weinberger, there are three order of order. The first order of order involves to the physical ordering of objects. In the first order, one object can only go to one place, just like one physical book can only be put into one specific shelf.  The second order of order is about card catalog. By separating information about the first-order objects from the objects themselves through alphabetical or chronological orders, the second order organized objects so you can locate them more easily in their physical places. Nevertheless, objects in the second order are still limited by the physical restriction since one book is still one book even with tag. Finally, in the third order of order—digital order, technology helps objects and information to get over their physical limitation. According to the professor, the third order of order is actually how human brain process messages and memories. Therefore, it is just the matter of time for humankind to accept this ultimate order of order. In this order, information can appear in multiple locations and has unlimited copies. This type of order not only increase the effectiveness of organizing information, but also drives innovation since the digital order motivate people to think outside of the box. Good news is that since children nowadays are raised in the background of the digital order, their creativity and innovation will not be limited by the first and second order of order like their earlier generations. Therefore, maybe these children will be the most creative and innovative generation of human ever existed on the Earth.