IT Conversations continues to hit ’em out of the park. One of my latest favorites is a conference presentation by Clay Shirky called “Ontology is Overrated.” Shirky’s opposed to top-down ontologies that decide what categories make sense, then divide the information, at times arbitrarily, into those categories. Instead, he argues that semantics emerge from the user, not from the machine or the network or the founders of information repositories. He has many mocking things to say about a range of sites, from Yahoo to the Library of Congress, and while his constant interjections of “right?” get very wearying, there’s much truth and intelligence in what he has to say. I was particularly struck by his assertion that we lose “signal” (his word for meaningful information) if we collapse apparently synonymous categories into one master category. His example of “cinema”/”film” and “movies” was persuasive and very funny.

On the other hand, his talk supported a philosophically naive idea I’ve blogged about before: the notion that questions of epistemology and ontology are irrelevant on the Internet because majority rules when it comes to deciding on questions of meaning. The way Shirky puts it, there are two possibilities: either the world makes sense, or we make sense of the world. The Internet decisively proves the latter, according to Shirky. In philosophical terms, though Shirky doesn’t use these words, pragmatism wins.

I have two primary difficulties with Shirky’s dichotomy. One is that I don’t believe anyone would try to make sense of the world if they didn’t, on some level, believe that the world made sense, i.e., that they weren’t simply imposing meaning on it. Another is that it’s hard to see how any ethical system other than “might makes right” can be built on Shirky’s argument.

It’s interesting to see how the speed and pervasiveness of the Internet seem to generate meaning automatically by what appears to be a radical democracy. I find the Internet breathtaking, too, but I think it’s sentimental and dangerous to think that networked computing will give us a world in which, to quote Alexander Pope, “everything that is, is right.”