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Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder
“Perfectly placed to tell us whatâ€s really new about [the] second-generation Web.â€â€” Los Angeles Times Business visionary and bestselling author David Weinberger charts how as business, politics, science, and media move online, the rules of the physical world—in which everything has a place—are upended. In the digital world, everything has its places, with transformative †Information is now a social asset and should be made public, for anyone to link, organize, and make more valuable. †Thereâ€s no such thing as “too much†information. More information gives people the hooks to find what they need. †Messiness is a digital virtue, leading to new ideas, efficiency, and social knowledge. †Authorities are less important than buddies. Rather than relying on businesses or reviews for product information, customers trust people like themselves. With the shift to digital music standing as the model for the future in virtually every industry, Everything Is Miscellaneous shows how anyone can reap rewards from the rise of digital knowledge.
288 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2007
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August 31, 2007
Mostly I learned that Weinberger hasn't been paying attention.
Clay Shirky's article in 2005 on ontologies said it earlier, more succintly, and with less self-aggrandizement. Any man (and yes, I mean Weinberger) who gets halfway through a book that he starts by deriding librarians and then tries to reinvent Ranganathan while hoping that if he shoves in a couple of nifty anecdotes about the man librarians won't notice he's having to backtrack rapidly has missed the point, the boat, and the cluebus.
The attitude that librarians don't realise that virtual items can have 360 tagging is nonsensical in the extreme. The barest conversation with any cataloguer (I was one once myself) will make that clear. Librarians continue however to have to manage *physical* items, which is why we continue to use subject headings and classification. Digitised materials can be and are managed in quite different ways. That Weinberger doesn't realise this is a failure of his imagination.
If everything is miscellaneous, then nothing is meaningful. And that, too, is patently absurd. Sites such as flikr and delicious are using rankings of number of links, recommended links. Emergent tagging itself depends on people deciding for themselves that some things *aren't* miscellaneous, and assigning significence, preferring some terms over others, and building meaning by consensus.
Directed folksonomies may well be the way of the future, but they are anything but miscellaneous.
Clay Shirky's article in 2005 on ontologies said it earlier, more succintly, and with less self-aggrandizement. Any man (and yes, I mean Weinberger) who gets halfway through a book that he starts by deriding librarians and then tries to reinvent Ranganathan while hoping that if he shoves in a couple of nifty anecdotes about the man librarians won't notice he's having to backtrack rapidly has missed the point, the boat, and the cluebus.
The attitude that librarians don't realise that virtual items can have 360 tagging is nonsensical in the extreme. The barest conversation with any cataloguer (I was one once myself) will make that clear. Librarians continue however to have to manage *physical* items, which is why we continue to use subject headings and classification. Digitised materials can be and are managed in quite different ways. That Weinberger doesn't realise this is a failure of his imagination.
If everything is miscellaneous, then nothing is meaningful. And that, too, is patently absurd. Sites such as flikr and delicious are using rankings of number of links, recommended links. Emergent tagging itself depends on people deciding for themselves that some things *aren't* miscellaneous, and assigning significence, preferring some terms over others, and building meaning by consensus.
Directed folksonomies may well be the way of the future, but they are anything but miscellaneous.
January 15, 2008
As far as I got, anyway, the author has one thing he wants to tell you in this book: faceted classification is awesome, and now that more things are digitized, we can actually use it.
(Faceted classification is where something is categorized in more than one place, e.g. how you can put a book on more than one Goodreads shelf, as opposed to in real life where it can only be in one physical location)
I kept skipping chapters to see if he had anything else to say, but if he did I missed it. He does have a lot of interesting metaphors that he uses to explain things, at least. Like if your kitchen was the Dewey Decimal System, chocolate sprinkles would be a spice. Or something.
I don't mean to be rude about it, but I kept checking to see what year this was written. He keeps talking about card catalogs! And I'm not sure if he thinks these ideas are going to be news to librarians, but hm, not since about 1930 (see S.R. Ranganathan).
I think I would have found this fascinating if I hadn't already gone and went to library school.
(Faceted classification is where something is categorized in more than one place, e.g. how you can put a book on more than one Goodreads shelf, as opposed to in real life where it can only be in one physical location)
I kept skipping chapters to see if he had anything else to say, but if he did I missed it. He does have a lot of interesting metaphors that he uses to explain things, at least. Like if your kitchen was the Dewey Decimal System, chocolate sprinkles would be a spice. Or something.
I don't mean to be rude about it, but I kept checking to see what year this was written. He keeps talking about card catalogs! And I'm not sure if he thinks these ideas are going to be news to librarians, but hm, not since about 1930 (see S.R. Ranganathan).
I think I would have found this fascinating if I hadn't already gone and went to library school.
Read
January 24, 2008People like to ask me about books - I've been asked to name my favorite books, the books I would take to a desert island, and the books that have changed my life. My favorites change from year to year, I would need an entire cruise ship to fill with enough books to sustain me on a desert island, and while books in general have changed my life, I've never had any sort of epiphany while reading, at least not that I can recall. Until now. Reading Everything is Miscellaneous gave me my moment. It was a "EUREKA" moment, rather like that lovely story about Archimedes in the bathtub. Lest you think I've completely taken leave of my senses, let me get down to it.
This is a book about many things, but what I am focusing on here is organization. Specifically, the organization of books, in a library. 95% of all public libraries use the Dewey Decimal System, which has worked reasonably well for quite a long while. Other libraries use a different classification system culled from the Library of Congress, while bookstores tend to use something called BISAC, the Book Industry Standards and Communications. But what Mr. Weinberger wonders is this: if we have computers and are using them, why are we limiting ourselves to such specifics? And it made me wonder too. Yes, books need a specific place on the shelf, but we can look for books, search for books, in other ways that have nothing to do with the physical location of the book, but rather with the need of the reader.
But that's only a small part of this fascinating book. Weinberger examines how Google has changed our lives, the wonder of Wikipedia, looks at the business model of the digital music industry and what it portends for the future of all businesses, and even why Staples is so successful. I read this book several months ago, and have just reread it, and I may have to read it yet again.
This is a book about many things, but what I am focusing on here is organization. Specifically, the organization of books, in a library. 95% of all public libraries use the Dewey Decimal System, which has worked reasonably well for quite a long while. Other libraries use a different classification system culled from the Library of Congress, while bookstores tend to use something called BISAC, the Book Industry Standards and Communications. But what Mr. Weinberger wonders is this: if we have computers and are using them, why are we limiting ourselves to such specifics? And it made me wonder too. Yes, books need a specific place on the shelf, but we can look for books, search for books, in other ways that have nothing to do with the physical location of the book, but rather with the need of the reader.
But that's only a small part of this fascinating book. Weinberger examines how Google has changed our lives, the wonder of Wikipedia, looks at the business model of the digital music industry and what it portends for the future of all businesses, and even why Staples is so successful. I read this book several months ago, and have just reread it, and I may have to read it yet again.
November 30, 2007
As a librarian, I try to read books about the current evolutionary changes our profession is undergoing. This book had been recommended to me by a library blogger who I frequent daily. The author was also a co-author of "The Cluetrain Manifesto," which I found fluffy and empty, mainly because it dealt with marketing and the "changing paradigms" of business. This book, however, was much better.
Weinberger takes us through the new digital hyperworld of Web 2.0 and online organization, cataloging, retrieval, and storage. Early in the book he explains the three orders of organization, which go from the purely physical to the purely digital. The greatest advantage of our new digital world is that we are able to categorize things in multiple places. He often noted how physical items are made of atoms, which, despite their size, take up more space than the electrons and digital information we use. Now we are able to put a photo on Flickr and give it as many labels as possible, rather than putting it into a cabinet and cataloging it somewhere else, hoping we might find it again someday.
Most of what Weinberger talks about in the book is stuff I am already familiar with as a librarian. However, I do enjoy hearing another professional's opinion of these new technologies. I found new ways to use my delicious account and also some interesting ideas on the future of Wikipedia and E-Books. Weinberger tends to repeat himself a lot (which is something that happened in Cluetrain as well) but in the end the book is a fun read for anyone looking to learn about the new digital future. I know trying to keep up with it is a hard task. Every day at work I find some new website or new Web 2.0 tool that we must all use. Many of these fall by the wayside, but some have made my digital life much easier and much more fun.
Cheers to the future of the web!
Weinberger takes us through the new digital hyperworld of Web 2.0 and online organization, cataloging, retrieval, and storage. Early in the book he explains the three orders of organization, which go from the purely physical to the purely digital. The greatest advantage of our new digital world is that we are able to categorize things in multiple places. He often noted how physical items are made of atoms, which, despite their size, take up more space than the electrons and digital information we use. Now we are able to put a photo on Flickr and give it as many labels as possible, rather than putting it into a cabinet and cataloging it somewhere else, hoping we might find it again someday.
Most of what Weinberger talks about in the book is stuff I am already familiar with as a librarian. However, I do enjoy hearing another professional's opinion of these new technologies. I found new ways to use my delicious account and also some interesting ideas on the future of Wikipedia and E-Books. Weinberger tends to repeat himself a lot (which is something that happened in Cluetrain as well) but in the end the book is a fun read for anyone looking to learn about the new digital future. I know trying to keep up with it is a hard task. Every day at work I find some new website or new Web 2.0 tool that we must all use. Many of these fall by the wayside, but some have made my digital life much easier and much more fun.
Cheers to the future of the web!
December 30, 2008
What I love MOST about this book are the AWESOMELY hysterical reviews from librarians or Information Science (IA) folk. People who subsequently find themselves more and more affected by the very forces they find so objectionable in this book.
This book deserves a read and rates almost as highly as the Clue Train manifesto. Here's a few choice quotes:
"The result is a startling change in our culture's belief that truth means accuracy, effectiveness requires adherence to clear lines of command and control, and knowledge is power."
"It's not what you know, and it's not even who you know. It's how much knowledge you give away."
"A topic is not a domain with edges. It is how passion focuses itself."
And my absolute favorite, "Reading will cease being a one-way activity. It will become as social as the knowledge our children are developing as they instant-message one another about homework."
This book deserves a read and rates almost as highly as the Clue Train manifesto. Here's a few choice quotes:
"The result is a startling change in our culture's belief that truth means accuracy, effectiveness requires adherence to clear lines of command and control, and knowledge is power."
"It's not what you know, and it's not even who you know. It's how much knowledge you give away."
"A topic is not a domain with edges. It is how passion focuses itself."
And my absolute favorite, "Reading will cease being a one-way activity. It will become as social as the knowledge our children are developing as they instant-message one another about homework."
November 16, 2007
Absolutely ridiculous book, for exactly the opposite reason as The Cult of the Amateur. As a librarian his laissez faire approach to information categorization and storage made me physically ill.
January 9, 2015
I read Everything Is Miscellaneous by the pool at the Madang Resort while on vacation this week. That was the right setting for a book like this. David Weinberger's writing is typical "general readership" fare, full of stories and interesting bits of history. It falls short of really digging into the academic rigor beneath the ideas he discusses, and that makes it good light reading for a holiday. It's interesting to read this book now, 8 years after its initial publication, and to see just how much the "digital disorder" has changed my life in those few short years. Much of what Weinberger lauds as new and different is now common sense and normal (though I don't know that even in 2007 everything he says would have been startling). As more years go by, this book's value will be just that: marking a point at which Western culture and its related knowledge systems changed.
I say "Western culture" because that is the book's (mostly unstated) focus, and its most significant weakness. One of Weinberger's main points throughout Everything Is Miscellaneous is that knowledge, in the digital realm, no longer needs to be physically arranged in this or that structure, but it can instead be a big messy pile of miscellany. What brings order to that miscellany are tags. Tagging the miscellaneous allows anyone anywhere to bring the miscellaneous into whatever order makes sense to that person at that time. Weinberger celebrates the World Wide Web as humanity's greatest achievement in knowledge and information. Because it is open and available to all, without centralized authority, it grows in glorious miscellaneous usefulness, each instance of tagging or linking contributing to the overall usefulness of the miscellany to everyone else.
Unfortunately, because the dominant language of the Web is English, the door is effectively shut on many people in the world. Because the lion's share of tagging is in English, the "miscellaneous" benefits of the Web make a lot of sense to native English speakers in the USA; quite a bit of sense to native English and second-language English speakers elsewhere; and not much sense at all to the minority language communities of the world. Weinberger needs a single language for tagging in order to make his point, because a Web that uses 7,000 parallel tagging systems (one for each of the world's languages) doesn't necessarily allow for the amazing usefulness of the digital world. (And it doesn't work to say that each of the 7,000 tagging systems could simply be linked to the others, because languages don't have a neat, tidy one-to-one relation at the word level.) Instead of the dizzyingly fast trip through a number of different tangents in the last chapter, I would have preferred seeing Weinberger wrestle with the implications of a digital miscellany that is primarily created by and for only part of the world's population. In what ways is this glorious digital disorder shutting the door on a lot of possible directions the world might have gone in the early 21st century? I suppose that's a book that will be written in hindsight and, I expect, with some regrets.
The other problem I have with Weinberger's argument is his giddiness about the decentralizing of knowledge authorities. His idea is that the "right" knowledge will now sort of float to the surface, through recommendations, links, tags, and so forth. So the old days of policing knowledge through peer review and editorial boards are not entirely gone, but certainly less necessary than before. That has the sound of wisdom, and I agree that the peer review process is sometimes pointlessly cumbersome, slow, or flawed. But I can't agree that we no longer need authorities who shape the flow of new information. This is partly because of what I'm seeing on the Web now, eight years from Everything Is Miscellaneous. What I see is not that more people are getting better information, but rather that people tend to default to low-level, easy information that's pleasant to the eyes or ears. Rather than the Web leading to better-informed lives, I'm seeing it lead to increasing triviality and self-centeredness. It may be easier now to order miscellaneous information, but it's also changing our minds to be more superficial and forgetful. Weinberger is gleeful about the changes in the digital world, but I lament what we're losing in order to gain the power of the miscellaneous. Humanity did pretty well for thousands of years before the Web. Yes, the Web brings benefits, but they are not necessary for survival or for the good life, so I'd prefer that Weinberger look at digital information systems as something different, with positive and negative results, rather than as The Greatest Thing Humans Have Ever Done.
Everything Is Miscellaneous is not perfect, but it was enjoyable for what it is. It skims a very interesting surface of some big ideas that are worth thinking about. I look forward to reading Weinberger's follow-up, Too Big to Know, to see how his perspective on these issues developed over the next few years.
September 4, 2020
This book was really interesting for me personally because it touched on a lot of computer sciencey things. Some of the main topics were why the Dewey Decimal system is falling apart, how Wikipedia manages to be surprisingly accurate and neutral, and why Aristotelean definitions are unusable in a digital setting. The main idea was that most of our modern systems for organizing information in a physical setting pale in comparison to the digital possibilities. One major exception it noted was the Periodic Table of Elements. The book was written in ‘07, so it’s interesting to note how some things it wrote about have changed over the past 13 years like iTunes not focusing on (or maybe even having??) user created playlists or the fact that I don’t know a single person who still uses Flickr. At one point, the author talked a lot about the usefulness of tags, and it made me realize that Twitter was just beginning to get started as the book was likely being written.
February 1, 2016
Very well presented case for the argument that how we have come to classify everything in our daily lives, from books to animals and pictures to music the Aristolean way is up for question. facts are well presented and interspersed with some well made arguments. My main beef is that at times it does come across as everything internet related is cool despite, given the date of being published ~2007, it was still finding it's way and in many regards still is. Like all books there is an element of repetition and relying on the standard Google, Wikipedia and amazon to rationalise everything internet! Still overall very readable and make up for the transgressions although don't w\ait too much longer before reading it as 8 years is a long time for a book like this...
November 15, 2010
I had to read this for a class, but I found it quite enjoyable. Weinberger backs up his points with some amusing examples (I laughed several times while reading) and really makes one think about the direction information organization is taking in the digital age.
June 6, 2013
Un titolo che nasconde un elogio del genio nelle menti di archivisti e catalogatori. Dietro il disordine apparente della contemporaneità frammentata esiste un ordine originario: ripristinarlo è il compito di umanisti e scienziati, sembra dirci Weinberger. Interessante il capitolo su Dewey.
August 6, 2017
I read this book for an LIS class and it was decent. Sometimes I thought it was too theoretical and that the theory was shaky from time to time. Many of the examples Weinberger gives are really interesting and he definitely inspired me to look at some things differently.
April 6, 2015
Legal, com boas ideias mas extenso demais para isso. A ideia principal, de que organização digital (ele chama de terceira ordem) é uma outra forma de organizar completamente diferente das outras, com sobreposição de categorias, tags e etc poderia ser bem mais resumida.
October 12, 2018
From atoms to bits and how we all can add and retrieve information in the third order.
Dewey, Wikipedia, del.icio.us and much, much more.
Dewey, Wikipedia, del.icio.us and much, much more.
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June 23, 2020In Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, author David Weinberger argues that the avalanche of digital information is transforming the way that people navigate and utilize information. Weinberger argues that the formal, didactic systems of the past (think Dewey Decimal) are being replaced by information that can be sorted, tagged, and classified in spontaneous and innovative ways.
Weinberger’s miscellany thesis (information is now contextual rather than of inherent weight and value) is helpful to consider when planning beginning computer courses. Searching for information is an essential Internet skill; we spend a lot of time here coaching users to enter URLs in the right bar, to look for the search box on a given page, etc. But the concept of searching itself – identifying and utilizing keywords, authority of information, scope of search engine – is something that deserves its own emphasis and exploration. The move from information having a ‘correct place’ to information being about the most helpful connections between information is helpful to consider when attempting to explain concepts like posts on social media, links, etc.
I share Weinberger’s fascination with information, and am always thrilled when I can coax a student into using Wikipedia for fun or adopting self-directed research projects. But students don’t always want (nor need) this kind of information-navigating-epiphany kind of experience, especially when they are just trying to make their way through labyrinthine unemployment pages. Still, I think that these particular themes about sorting and navigating data are helpful to work into activities whenever possible.
In general, I enjoyed reading Everything is Miscellaneous. The structure of the book was somewhat wandery, however. After this book, I’m ready to set aside academic explorations like this one for a while and focus more on cultural/local histories.
Weinberger’s miscellany thesis (information is now contextual rather than of inherent weight and value) is helpful to consider when planning beginning computer courses. Searching for information is an essential Internet skill; we spend a lot of time here coaching users to enter URLs in the right bar, to look for the search box on a given page, etc. But the concept of searching itself – identifying and utilizing keywords, authority of information, scope of search engine – is something that deserves its own emphasis and exploration. The move from information having a ‘correct place’ to information being about the most helpful connections between information is helpful to consider when attempting to explain concepts like posts on social media, links, etc.
I share Weinberger’s fascination with information, and am always thrilled when I can coax a student into using Wikipedia for fun or adopting self-directed research projects. But students don’t always want (nor need) this kind of information-navigating-epiphany kind of experience, especially when they are just trying to make their way through labyrinthine unemployment pages. Still, I think that these particular themes about sorting and navigating data are helpful to work into activities whenever possible.
In general, I enjoyed reading Everything is Miscellaneous. The structure of the book was somewhat wandery, however. After this book, I’m ready to set aside academic explorations like this one for a while and focus more on cultural/local histories.
July 1, 2021
Suggests the Potential of Organizations as a Result of the Digital Revolution - Weinberger contrasts our customary spatial, physical approach to organization in the face of the seemingly unlimited potential based on digital technology. His text suggests new possibilities for expanding our thinking and means of organizing.
There are many examples that show the difference between the placement of items such as in an actual retail store or library vs. the myriad of ways that such items can be cataloged and called up digitally by those seeking them. The implication is that traditional tree structures--organization charts, the Dewey decimal system, some knowledge management approaches--are being superseded by other means of arraying information digitally.
Accordingly, rather than building "trees" that define the relationship of every bit of data in a company, new roles and tasks involve assembling enriched pools of data objects where relationships to one another can change and vary constantly, depending on who is looking at them.
With these new capabilities in mind, Weinberger makes reference to electronic organization charting that has multiple dimensions and is more like showing social networks where one has primary reporting relationships and accountabilities as well as many other connections in "hyperlinked organizations."
Read this book for an excellent primer on this new perspective and its possibilities.
There are many examples that show the difference between the placement of items such as in an actual retail store or library vs. the myriad of ways that such items can be cataloged and called up digitally by those seeking them. The implication is that traditional tree structures--organization charts, the Dewey decimal system, some knowledge management approaches--are being superseded by other means of arraying information digitally.
Accordingly, rather than building "trees" that define the relationship of every bit of data in a company, new roles and tasks involve assembling enriched pools of data objects where relationships to one another can change and vary constantly, depending on who is looking at them.
With these new capabilities in mind, Weinberger makes reference to electronic organization charting that has multiple dimensions and is more like showing social networks where one has primary reporting relationships and accountabilities as well as many other connections in "hyperlinked organizations."
Read this book for an excellent primer on this new perspective and its possibilities.
January 31, 2013
David Weinberger author of Everything is Miscellaneous: the power of the New Digital Disorder, introduces his’ readers to a cast of characters that influenced the categorization and organization of material. Weinberger stated that information came in three orders of order and the first order was the placement of a physical thing and the second order was the structuring of an object containing atoms. A card catalog would be an example of the second order. The third order consisted of data being digitized into bits.
Weinberger referred to knowledge as miscellaneous, explaining that it does not fit into a nice orderly space, contrary to the Dewey decimal system and the alphabetical arrangement of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Thus, the problem with the first two orders is the limitations brought on by constraining how society retrieves facts and ideas. The card catalog for instance, only had so much space available to write all that described a book and what connected it to another book or item in a library; in addition, he used the illustration of a tree. The idea behind it was to say that shelves are like branches and the books are the leaves. A book can only fill up one spot on a shelf, just like a leaf can only exist in one place on a branch.
Weinberger wrote in length about the third order, thereby referencing ways through the Internet that an individual could gather and search information. Going back to the leaves and branches scenario, the Internet has many branches and the leaves of knowledge can subsist in more than one place at a time. There is no end to the ways in which something can bridge to something else. It is on a much greater scale that through the Internet knowledge is intertwined in ways that go beyond a few descriptive word searches on a library catalog.
Personally, I thought this book was thoughtful and insightful and it flowed nicely from one subject to the next. And well, let’s face it when you think of reading a book on the organization and categorization of information you might at first want to cringe; however, I thought David Weinberger captivated his audience. I was pleasantly surprised at how interesting I found his thoughts and ideas. That being said, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty and the aspects of this book that I liked and did not like.
I never really gave much thought, until this class and reading this book, on how challenging and difficult it would be to come up with just the right words to characterize something. Or, the married of ways ideas and knowledge are interconnected and how they differ from one person to the next. An example Weinberger used to capsulate this notion of intermingling of data was pictures, especially digital photos that can be downloaded and arranged on Flickr and the activity of tagging them. He highlighted the mass amounts of pictures being shared and the problems that tagging them creates, because there will be a certain percentage of “ambiguity” involved; seemingly because, each person will have a different meaning and interpretation and that gets shared with everyone. A person can tag a photo “SF,” but does that stand for San Francisco, San Fernando, or Sally Field. That information will only be relevant to the person who tagged it. However, the Internet, Weinberger argued demonstrates the complexity of the branches. A person searching for data on San Francisco will find links that lead them to other links, building a highway that will take them to the best restaurants and sites and to all the great tourist locations, etc.
Some of the things in this book I did not like were the elitist attitudes Weinberger continued to allude to. He stated that people in authority were hoarding information and the access to it, in order to have power regarding how it is distributed. Everyone has an agenda, even this author. I felt the author had an elitist perspective as well, towards the Internet. I think the Internet has enriched our lives, but it has its share of problems too. During our class introductions, most of us referred to the library as a sanctuary. Libraries still hold an important place in society. I do agree that a majority of libraries’ databases could use some updating and connect books and items in a more cohesive way.
One last observation, at times I thought David Weinberger was a tree-hugger, nothing wrong with that. I love trees too and I also enjoy reading e-books; however, I do very much still enjoy the feel of holding a book in my hands and smelling the pages. Furthermore, I do not think I am ready to have every part of my reading experience open to the world at large. I am referring to this passage, “Every time a student highlights or annotates a page, that information will be used—with permission—to enhance the public metadata about the book. Even how long it takes people to get through pages or how often they go back to particular pages will enrich our third-order world (Weinberger, 222).” I wonder how long before it is done without an individual’s permission.
Concepts in the book that related to how I organize my own life were the stuff about organizing the silverware drawer. I think a majority of us do that. Much easier to grab what you need. The section when he talked about how we put our clothes in ordered drawers. So true, I have a place for socks and they all need to match. You cannot have one red and the other orange. In my pantry, I have items clustered together, for example all desserts and snacks in one place, then canned items in another space, and then subdivided; for instance, all canned-corn goes together, etc. I think you get the picture. One last thing, on my goodreads page, I love to make shelves for categorizing the books I have read or want to read.
Weinberger, David. Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2007.
Weinberger referred to knowledge as miscellaneous, explaining that it does not fit into a nice orderly space, contrary to the Dewey decimal system and the alphabetical arrangement of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Thus, the problem with the first two orders is the limitations brought on by constraining how society retrieves facts and ideas. The card catalog for instance, only had so much space available to write all that described a book and what connected it to another book or item in a library; in addition, he used the illustration of a tree. The idea behind it was to say that shelves are like branches and the books are the leaves. A book can only fill up one spot on a shelf, just like a leaf can only exist in one place on a branch.
Weinberger wrote in length about the third order, thereby referencing ways through the Internet that an individual could gather and search information. Going back to the leaves and branches scenario, the Internet has many branches and the leaves of knowledge can subsist in more than one place at a time. There is no end to the ways in which something can bridge to something else. It is on a much greater scale that through the Internet knowledge is intertwined in ways that go beyond a few descriptive word searches on a library catalog.
Personally, I thought this book was thoughtful and insightful and it flowed nicely from one subject to the next. And well, let’s face it when you think of reading a book on the organization and categorization of information you might at first want to cringe; however, I thought David Weinberger captivated his audience. I was pleasantly surprised at how interesting I found his thoughts and ideas. That being said, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty and the aspects of this book that I liked and did not like.
I never really gave much thought, until this class and reading this book, on how challenging and difficult it would be to come up with just the right words to characterize something. Or, the married of ways ideas and knowledge are interconnected and how they differ from one person to the next. An example Weinberger used to capsulate this notion of intermingling of data was pictures, especially digital photos that can be downloaded and arranged on Flickr and the activity of tagging them. He highlighted the mass amounts of pictures being shared and the problems that tagging them creates, because there will be a certain percentage of “ambiguity” involved; seemingly because, each person will have a different meaning and interpretation and that gets shared with everyone. A person can tag a photo “SF,” but does that stand for San Francisco, San Fernando, or Sally Field. That information will only be relevant to the person who tagged it. However, the Internet, Weinberger argued demonstrates the complexity of the branches. A person searching for data on San Francisco will find links that lead them to other links, building a highway that will take them to the best restaurants and sites and to all the great tourist locations, etc.
Some of the things in this book I did not like were the elitist attitudes Weinberger continued to allude to. He stated that people in authority were hoarding information and the access to it, in order to have power regarding how it is distributed. Everyone has an agenda, even this author. I felt the author had an elitist perspective as well, towards the Internet. I think the Internet has enriched our lives, but it has its share of problems too. During our class introductions, most of us referred to the library as a sanctuary. Libraries still hold an important place in society. I do agree that a majority of libraries’ databases could use some updating and connect books and items in a more cohesive way.
One last observation, at times I thought David Weinberger was a tree-hugger, nothing wrong with that. I love trees too and I also enjoy reading e-books; however, I do very much still enjoy the feel of holding a book in my hands and smelling the pages. Furthermore, I do not think I am ready to have every part of my reading experience open to the world at large. I am referring to this passage, “Every time a student highlights or annotates a page, that information will be used—with permission—to enhance the public metadata about the book. Even how long it takes people to get through pages or how often they go back to particular pages will enrich our third-order world (Weinberger, 222).” I wonder how long before it is done without an individual’s permission.
Concepts in the book that related to how I organize my own life were the stuff about organizing the silverware drawer. I think a majority of us do that. Much easier to grab what you need. The section when he talked about how we put our clothes in ordered drawers. So true, I have a place for socks and they all need to match. You cannot have one red and the other orange. In my pantry, I have items clustered together, for example all desserts and snacks in one place, then canned items in another space, and then subdivided; for instance, all canned-corn goes together, etc. I think you get the picture. One last thing, on my goodreads page, I love to make shelves for categorizing the books I have read or want to read.
Weinberger, David. Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2007.
January 27, 2020
Enjoyed this book's take on how the internet age allows each of us to categorize and define things individually and specifically for our own purpose. History on the Dewey decimal system and how plants and animals are categorized was informative. His explanation of a robin being a "good example" of a bird where a penguin stretched my thinking. Also, the value of Wikipedia and how this "encyclopedia" is not limited by size and space. The part that it also was able to adjust and adapt to errors and societal changes made me laugh since this "book" was limited by both of these items. Made me wonder how today's political and social climate might have been interpreted by the author. Some parts of this book were a little repetitive and the stress of a "miscellaneous" world that he talked about exhausted me, but I found value in this book.
August 6, 2018
This book by its very dry nonfiction-prose nature was a hard-slogging read that took me longer than intended. Of course, I started it during my vacation in Iowa with a large number of other things to occupy my mind. It was worth it, in the long run, but not nearly as enjoyable as nonfiction by Loren Eisley or Charles Lamb or many other gifted essayists I have read and enjoyed.
July 17, 2018
This one was hard for me to get through. I was definitely reading out of my comprehension level. I consider myself smart, but this one was just so abstract. I did keep with it and tried to get as much as possible from it, but honestly, I didn't get much.
April 10, 2020
This one reads like a novel, although it dwells on the origins of classification schemes, such as the alphabet or the Melvil Dewey system, which remained at the heart of how we organized knowledge until digitization turned everything on its head.
May 17, 2017
Understandably dated at this point, but what Weinberger says about ideas of objectivity in practices of information organization remain crucial to how we should imagine this work going forward.
July 31, 2018
Top-notch.
September 21, 2018
Disclaimer: I only read the second half for school. Intriguing nonetheless. Perhaps I'll make a new tag for books I only read part of for school?
March 21, 2021
A very good book dealing with the intersections of digital media, technology, and innovation into our society.
July 12, 2021
book on information systems, from the early days of the interwebs when the net was going to make everything awesome in Tomorrowland. The information superhighway did not age well.
Read
February 28, 2023Elogio del disordine. Le regole del nuovo mondo digitale by David Weinberger (2010)
February 24, 2010
originally reviewed on my blog:
I just finished reading1 David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous and I find it to be a pretty engaging description of how the state of knowledge evolved with time, and now it has given me a chance to write down some thoughts.
The basic gist of the book is that knowledge is no longer tied to the physical (e.g. books), which used to limit how one went about organizing and finding it (e.g. Dewey decimal system). Now we can attach as much metadata as our hearts desire, which technology helps us sift through to help us find what we want. Instead of each book having a particular place, as in a warehouse, or a relative position (alphabetical within a subject), an individual leaf of information lives on a multitude of trees simultaneously, and the trees themselves are dynamically created and rearranged for each user on the fly.
The first few chapters focused on how knowledge has been historically organized over the centuries. I did skim through a few of the middle chapters, it seemed to be pretty straightforward commentary on the digital lives most of us now lead – user created content, social tags and lists, auto-recommendation, etc. Some over-simplified, in that sometimes unavoidable awkwardness that comes out of describing something neat and complex yet obvious to those leading digital lives. It was refreshing to read about the downsides of scientific publications like Nature and Science (e.g. good science isn’t enough2 to publish because of how few articles get in, the research has to be “sexy”) and how the new comer PLoS One aims to correct these shortcomings. Because this was just the topic that was discussed at the Neuroscience retreat last year (in a lecture about the then-upcoming PLoS One), scientists care about this stuff and it comes back every so often.
Although I never considered it myself, I totally got it when Danae started her Master of Library Science. I would argue that more than anything else, what we’re producing most of in the world today is information. Perhaps capture and disseminate is a more appropriate description. Information, by itself, is agnostic to how it gets used (or abused). But the Cliff Stoll-ian side of me says that we should be weary of the exponentially growing amount of information, and not just for the obvious Big Brother / privacy reasons (e.g. “Plate reader draws objections of ACLU“).
The non-obvious threat of information is that we’re drowning in it (my claim). Here I’m glad Weinberger mentions Cass Sunstein’s book Republic.com3, the basic thesis of which4 is that with more and more information out there, we can all end up listening, watching, and reading only that which reinforces our world view – drowning out everything else without even having to plug up our ears and going “LALALALALA”, but by finding podcasts, channels, and blogs where others are doing the “LALALALALA” for us.
Touched by His Noodly AppendageIn many ways, this leads to huge portions of the population nonsensically parroting something like “Evolution is just a theory” to one another. Scientific theories both explain observed phenomena (why living organisms share so much of their DNA) and make predictions about future observations (my niece’s hair color based on that of her parents, or maybe one you don’t hear about so often: regular use of antibacterial soap might be a bad idea, placing evolutionary pressure on the bacteria to evolve immunity to the soap). Moreover simpler or more elegant, straightforward theories are preferred (aka Occam’s Razor). Which is why Intelligent Design is on par with Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, not science. But this has been better described in other places and elsewhere (suggestions welcome). The point is that I’m worried that there’s no way anyone get through to the people that end up isolating themselves in their own feedback loops. I worry that not enough people engage enough to think on their own. Technology can’t fix this problem. No amount of metadata will ever be enough5.
In this entry, I’ve linked to Wikipedia a few times, and while I agree it should not be regularly used for primary research, I also welcome the explicit uncertainty inherent in a publicly editable wiki, as it reflects the tentative nature of information, and I think we should be somewhat skeptical about a great deal. I have also been recommended, though I have not yet read Manuel Castells’ The Internet Galaxy, though perhaps it is more topical for a future post I’ve been brewing for a while. Has anyone read it? …Anyway, this is my first pass at processing this stuff, hope it’s not too scatterbrained6.
1. In three evening sittings at Moe’s Books↩
2. some might even argue “isn’t required”↩
3. Republic.com starts with a succinct vignette: “the daily me“↩
4. on my quick skimming at the UCD bookstore this past Picnic Day.↩
5. a point I think the book misses↩
6. Cory Doctrow does a better job reviewing the book.↩
I just finished reading1 David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous and I find it to be a pretty engaging description of how the state of knowledge evolved with time, and now it has given me a chance to write down some thoughts.
The basic gist of the book is that knowledge is no longer tied to the physical (e.g. books), which used to limit how one went about organizing and finding it (e.g. Dewey decimal system). Now we can attach as much metadata as our hearts desire, which technology helps us sift through to help us find what we want. Instead of each book having a particular place, as in a warehouse, or a relative position (alphabetical within a subject), an individual leaf of information lives on a multitude of trees simultaneously, and the trees themselves are dynamically created and rearranged for each user on the fly.
The first few chapters focused on how knowledge has been historically organized over the centuries. I did skim through a few of the middle chapters, it seemed to be pretty straightforward commentary on the digital lives most of us now lead – user created content, social tags and lists, auto-recommendation, etc. Some over-simplified, in that sometimes unavoidable awkwardness that comes out of describing something neat and complex yet obvious to those leading digital lives. It was refreshing to read about the downsides of scientific publications like Nature and Science (e.g. good science isn’t enough2 to publish because of how few articles get in, the research has to be “sexy”) and how the new comer PLoS One aims to correct these shortcomings. Because this was just the topic that was discussed at the Neuroscience retreat last year (in a lecture about the then-upcoming PLoS One), scientists care about this stuff and it comes back every so often.
Although I never considered it myself, I totally got it when Danae started her Master of Library Science. I would argue that more than anything else, what we’re producing most of in the world today is information. Perhaps capture and disseminate is a more appropriate description. Information, by itself, is agnostic to how it gets used (or abused). But the Cliff Stoll-ian side of me says that we should be weary of the exponentially growing amount of information, and not just for the obvious Big Brother / privacy reasons (e.g. “Plate reader draws objections of ACLU“).
The non-obvious threat of information is that we’re drowning in it (my claim). Here I’m glad Weinberger mentions Cass Sunstein’s book Republic.com3, the basic thesis of which4 is that with more and more information out there, we can all end up listening, watching, and reading only that which reinforces our world view – drowning out everything else without even having to plug up our ears and going “LALALALALA”, but by finding podcasts, channels, and blogs where others are doing the “LALALALALA” for us.
Touched by His Noodly AppendageIn many ways, this leads to huge portions of the population nonsensically parroting something like “Evolution is just a theory” to one another. Scientific theories both explain observed phenomena (why living organisms share so much of their DNA) and make predictions about future observations (my niece’s hair color based on that of her parents, or maybe one you don’t hear about so often: regular use of antibacterial soap might be a bad idea, placing evolutionary pressure on the bacteria to evolve immunity to the soap). Moreover simpler or more elegant, straightforward theories are preferred (aka Occam’s Razor). Which is why Intelligent Design is on par with Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, not science. But this has been better described in other places and elsewhere (suggestions welcome). The point is that I’m worried that there’s no way anyone get through to the people that end up isolating themselves in their own feedback loops. I worry that not enough people engage enough to think on their own. Technology can’t fix this problem. No amount of metadata will ever be enough5.
In this entry, I’ve linked to Wikipedia a few times, and while I agree it should not be regularly used for primary research, I also welcome the explicit uncertainty inherent in a publicly editable wiki, as it reflects the tentative nature of information, and I think we should be somewhat skeptical about a great deal. I have also been recommended, though I have not yet read Manuel Castells’ The Internet Galaxy, though perhaps it is more topical for a future post I’ve been brewing for a while. Has anyone read it? …Anyway, this is my first pass at processing this stuff, hope it’s not too scatterbrained6.
1. In three evening sittings at Moe’s Books↩
2. some might even argue “isn’t required”↩
3. Republic.com starts with a succinct vignette: “the daily me“↩
4. on my quick skimming at the UCD bookstore this past Picnic Day.↩
5. a point I think the book misses↩
6. Cory Doctrow does a better job reviewing the book.↩
July 24, 2009
Both Nicholas Carr's The Big Switch and David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous tackle the same essential question: what happens when the whole world puts all of it's information on the same network? Carr focuses on the trend toward centralized computing to make sense of mass quantities of information as cheaply and efficiently a possible. Weinberger aims his focus at new attempts to organize, categorize, and make sense of the information. I feel that both books also share the same weakness: Carr often uses his argument as a pretext to rant about all he sees as wrong with the Internet while Weinberger frequently makes unrelated tangents to defend his beloved Internet against the naysayers.
Everything is Miscellaneous makes two basic arguments: 1.) there is no single way to categorize digital information and 2.) with so much information the role of knowledge is less about establishing objective truth and more about enabling common understanding. (More recently, Weinberger says "transparency is the new objectivity".)
In the summer of 2002 I bought my first digital scanner. The previous year I took nine months off from school and traveled around the world on a ticket that cost me less than $2,000. I had two shoeboxes full of photos; one from the trip, and the other with every photo I took before the trip. The photos from my trip were organized by country, but the photos from before the trip were organized by person. Now I was about to scan them into my computer and I needed to come up with a standard system to organize them. Would I put them into folders based on person, place, event, camera, or even the type of photo (landscape, portrait, black & white, color, etc.)? Fortunately I decided on organizing them based on time, but it sure made it a pain in the ass to find all photos of a particular person.
A few years later and I imported all my photos into iPhoto which allowed me to label each photo with multiple tags. Now every photo I import is tagged with its place, the people in it, the event, and the type of photo. If I want to see all my photos from South Africa or all my photos of Sparsh I simply perform the right search and an on-the-fly "folder" appears with the relevant photos. And it's not just photos I do this with. I tag my video using iMovie, my documents using Together, and even my financial records using Cha-Ching. But what is important is that tags allow us to place digital information in more than one digital shoebox. We organize information based on the appropriate context, and online context changes rapidly.
I was hoping to learn some new information about tag-based organization of information, but this book pretty much sticks to the basics. I also wish that it did a better job dealing with some of the criticisms of tags, but Weinberger's blog is a much better resource for digging deeper on the issue than this book.
Everything is Miscellaneous makes two basic arguments: 1.) there is no single way to categorize digital information and 2.) with so much information the role of knowledge is less about establishing objective truth and more about enabling common understanding. (More recently, Weinberger says "transparency is the new objectivity".)
In the summer of 2002 I bought my first digital scanner. The previous year I took nine months off from school and traveled around the world on a ticket that cost me less than $2,000. I had two shoeboxes full of photos; one from the trip, and the other with every photo I took before the trip. The photos from my trip were organized by country, but the photos from before the trip were organized by person. Now I was about to scan them into my computer and I needed to come up with a standard system to organize them. Would I put them into folders based on person, place, event, camera, or even the type of photo (landscape, portrait, black & white, color, etc.)? Fortunately I decided on organizing them based on time, but it sure made it a pain in the ass to find all photos of a particular person.
A few years later and I imported all my photos into iPhoto which allowed me to label each photo with multiple tags. Now every photo I import is tagged with its place, the people in it, the event, and the type of photo. If I want to see all my photos from South Africa or all my photos of Sparsh I simply perform the right search and an on-the-fly "folder" appears with the relevant photos. And it's not just photos I do this with. I tag my video using iMovie, my documents using Together, and even my financial records using Cha-Ching. But what is important is that tags allow us to place digital information in more than one digital shoebox. We organize information based on the appropriate context, and online context changes rapidly.
I was hoping to learn some new information about tag-based organization of information, but this book pretty much sticks to the basics. I also wish that it did a better job dealing with some of the criticisms of tags, but Weinberger's blog is a much better resource for digging deeper on the issue than this book.
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