Wienberger 9 and 10

My first reaction to Wienberger's chapter 9, Messiness as a Virtue, was near horror. Wienberger begins by labeling the levels and different types of messiness The example about photos as a third-order mess is was really stuck out to me. This example that he starts off with also really strikes home to me, since i am such a photo phenatic: "They are potential sources of memory... Maybe your kids are in the background of that awful photo of Aunt Sally and it brings back a surprising moment from your childhood." This exact moment has taken place in my family. At my baptism there is a generic photo of my mother holding me all wrapped in a blanket in the generic baptism pose, but in the background you can see my two older brothers (about 5 and six at the time) blowing out all the candles that are lit as prayers. It such a funny photo that we can't flip through the photos as a family without stopping to laugh about that one and remember how unruly my older brothers have always been. Wienberger makes a great point in stating that the more one would add to the shoe box ( a first-order mess) the less value it has, in the fact that the less likely one is in finding a particular photo. So as with photos, which easily can be applied as a metaphor for metadata, how does one go about organizing all this information? I also have to say here, it feels as if we've read this all before with Wienberger. To Wienberger the simple solution is to add metadata to each photo, making them smarter leaves. We even get another author in this reading stating that "the task of categorization systems is to provide maximum information with the least cognitive effort." What makes the internet so unique is that the "edges" of all information can be fuzzy. It can only be a percentile relation to something else. So what I take from Wienberger's assement is that organization is best within the digital world, because of the infite possibilities to lable and search, but I'm also left with a sense of chaos and unavoidable messes in the physical world.