The Power of One

On Tuesday, WNYC's Brian Lehrer show addressed libraries and information with two different interviews. Scott Douglas, librarian at the Anaheim Public Library, McSweeney's contributor and the author of Quiet, Please: Dispatches from a Public Librarian (Da Capo Press, 2008), talked about the library life today. And following that was The Power of One, in which Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, discussed the power of the internet to organize from the bottom up instead of from the top down.

Scott Douglas, author of the McSweeney's column Dispatches from a Public Librarian, dryly spoke about being a hipster librarian. This is nothing new if you read his column, in which he flirts with the shallower library zeitgeist (See Corny Library Pickup Lines, and How Librarians Effectively Shoot Them Down). Mr. Douglas is comfortable with the clichéd and pessimistic, leaving little room for inspiration or future-thinking.

Tags are those little nuggets of truth that we all crave and Shirky is a believer. He is critical of top-down classification schemes, and rightly so. But bottom-up classification schemes are not necessarily the solution. There is the desire in the Shirky cult to deify bottom-up organization, without critically assessing the structured, traditional literacy culture that surrounds us. When the majority of people apply a certain tag to a work, they are still harnessed to the same inherent language system (English in this case) that limits us in its structure. As the Playful Librarian notes, classification systems are all built on structured and labeled database systems. With these limitations, can we--the powers of one and many--really make Shirky(ies) happy? How do we shake this up and look at it differently? Luis von Ahn is an example.

The work of Luis von Ahn seeks to understand the crucial component of play in organizing knowledge. He makes human generated games based on tags that teach computers to understand beauty. Games pair random players to solve a computing problem. Because the two players get points when their answers (tags) match, the accuracy, fun quotient, and stakes of tagging increase. Freed from familiar structures, we can really ask what is beautiful? What has meaning to us as both one and a collective many?