Posted by Steve Dietz on September 10, 2004 10:53 AM
I just finished the second novel in Neal Stephenson'sBaroque Cycle,The Confusion. Even though it's taken me ages to read, I've been flogging it to friends and unsuspecting airplane seatmates alike for making the Enlightenment "moment" a believalbe mishmash of genius, imperialism, alchemy, luck, and, well, confusion. I just ran across (via a map credit in Shanghai Diary) Stephenson's Metaweb site for Quicksilver, the first novel in the trilogy. It's set up like the Wikipedia and Stephenson writes:
My own view of the Metaweb is pretty straightforward: I don't think that the Internet, as it currently exists, does a very good job of explaining things to people. It is great for selling stuff, distributing news and dirty pictures, and a few other things. But when you need to get a good explanation of something, whether it is a scientific principle, a bit of gardening advice, or how to change a tire, you have to sift through a vast number of pages to find the one that gives you the explanation that is right for you. Generally this is not a problem with the explanations themselves. On the contrary, it seems as though a lot of people like to explain things on the Internet, and some of them are quite good at it. The problem lies in how these explanations are organized.
In the ongoing New-Media-Curating list discussion about taxonomy, Andreas Broeckmansuggested, as a response to how to write a heterogeneous set of accounts of new media that is also, in some sense, authoritative:
i would like to put forward the wikipedia as a site where a critical and diverse genealogy of media art could be developed - i find this a very appealing project to pursue by a community like this one.
Metaweb seems to be a kind of instance of this. It is separately hosted, but it is easy to imagine an article on Robert Boyle in Wikipedia referencing and linking an article on him in Metaweb, where he is a major character in Quicksilver. Of course, this doesn't completely solve how the link between metaweb and wikipedia is privileged over potentially thousands of other Robert Boyle links, which is the issue Stephenson starts with, but I still like the idea of extending Wikipedia for the uses of particular communities, whether it is Baroque Cycle afficionados or new media junkies.
As a kind of p.s. to the possibility of social knowledge and tools for social research, the Faculty of Taxonomy at the University of Openness - of which I am a member - along with the faculty wiki, uses del.ici.us as a keywordable bookmark aggregator, and I'm quite enamored of how easy it is to use.
P.P.S. At the end of The Confusion, Jack Shaftoe, "King of the Vagabonds" and one of the two main characters, stares up at Isaac Newton, who has recently taken over the Royal Mint (don't ask - it's all about the shift from land to commerce as an economic engine and Newton's authority, despite his penchant for alchemy, is required) and vows a good fight. The third volume, The System of the World, goes on sale September 21!
