"It's too early for us to be realistic," David Weinberger says in closing is2k7. Where reality is binary, forcing us to categorize each piece of information, digital networked storage lets us add metadata along multiple axes. We shouldn't rush to cram it all back into real boxes. Instead, we can build new structures, sometimes adding metadata to digital contents, sometimes using the "contents" as metadata with regard to another question we're asking.

That lack of hierarchy sounds threatening to some, perhaps including universities, who are accustomed to being the authorities. Online, we find new sources of authority, though we also have to learn and re-learn when not to trust both online and offline sources. The university's challenge, and all of ours, is to engage with these new sources of information and meta-information. The answer to "too much information" is likely not to shut off the spigot but to hand out better filters and filter-building toolkits (aggregators, search engines, databases, social network tools, and mashups).

I'm headed to Everything Is Miscellaneous for more.