Published: October 16, 2009 02:00 am      

TOM CHRISTY: Life in the random lane

There’s a book out now called “Everything is Miscellaneous,” written by David Weinberger. It’s a discussion about such interesting topics as alphabetization, filing systems and how mankind has come to order things in the world.

I know, it sounds like pure rubbish and a complete waste of time. But the key to the entire book is that up until this very moment in time, mankind has had to categorize everything in order to make sense of things. Organization is everything; the organized person is the powerful person. This is how we were raised and taught all our lives. It’s been darn good advice for thousands of years. But this book blows up that notion. This book marks this exact moment in time in which we live as the official break from organized thinking.

Like all major changes, this one seems contrary. It doesn’t seem right to consider that organization is not the optimization of all things as we know them. We all want to get smarter and we are certain that can only come through careful research and diligent, step-by-step, sequential learning. But the Internet has changed all that, and it’s not a regression for learning, but a monumental leap forward

We haven’t scratched the surface of the power that is the Internet, and that’s what makes this book and its concepts so important. We take for granted the Internet’s value when it makes getting a prescription filled quickly or finding out what that mole is on your arm as simple as typing “mole” into a search engine and scrolling for the results. But it’s that simplicity and transparency of our changed-learning that is where the Internet will revolutionize way we govern ourselves. And the way we governor ourselves, especially here in Western New York, is the key to our future.

Our brain works in mysterious ways, but mostly it works randomly. You see something about a man arrested on Anystreet USA and it’s interesting for a moment, but then you naturally think, “where is that location?” and “how many of these arrests are there each year?” and so on and so on until you’re far from the original thing that caught your eye. The human brain does one thing well — connecting the dots. We constantly wonder why things get from point to point, and that takes a wandering mind.

When you can take the powerful wandering mind of a human, combine it with the Internet and invent things and connect people like no other time in history, you can truly have a world-changing atmosphere.

I post for you here today one thing: If we could harness the greatest repository of information still unavailable to people, we could set about fixing what is wrong with Western New York and educate an entire generation of young people about public service and create a better tomorrow.

Until this very point in time — including right now — government is and has always been the repository and dispensary of all information regarding everything from dog licenses to sewer construction projects, and everything in between. I don’t mean to imply they ARE dispensing information the public actually cares about. By controlling the information and releasing what they deem acceptable, they are controlling the information stream. Never a good thing or something you think about when envisioning a democracy.

Millions of dollars are spent at the local level each year, but no one can see any records of where the money goes, who did the work, what was the impact, etc. And this has many drawbacks. Chief among them is a lack of confidence in our government and a hardening of our attitudes toward each other — a fostering of an “us” and “them” mentality that is never healthy. But the greatest drawback of all is education: Without a record of what happened, future leaders cannot make the necessary changes to ensure mistakes don’t happen again.

Basically, we’re a community of name-callers at this point. And it all can be directly tied to a lack of information from our greatest employer, our largest fiscal enterprise and the repository of our greatest database of information: Our local government.

If we can find a way to release every bit of information government controls, people will be able to connect all the dots, and we will be able to prevent future generations from fumbling along in their goals to have every generation of American’s have a better standard of living than the previous generation. A noble goal worth pursuing may be right here in front of us.

Tom Christy is the founder of FAIR Government, a non-political and non-editorial educational foundation dealing with local government issues. The Web site is www.fair-government.org. He encourages communication and can be reach via e-mail at aim1986@mac.com.