Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder
David Weinberger
May 2007
Henry Holt & Company
978-0-8050-8043-8
Library Journal (February 15, 2007)
Weinberger (fellow, Berkman Ctr. for the Internet & Society, Harvard Law Sch.; Small Pieces Loosely Joined) analyzes the Internet's impact on the way we look at the organization of information. As he sees it, the order of things, with the shift from the physical to the digital, is changing: in the physical world, everything had its own place; in the digital world, everything is miscellaneous, fitting into multiple categories. Weinberger describes and assesses the traditional ways of organizing information, including the examples of Dewey, Linnaeus, and Ranganathan, and then moves on to the new order including online digital arrangements of archival photographs from the Bettman Archive to the lists and categories of books and other products on Amazon.com. This thought-provoking book allows readers to step back and take a look at how the digital world impacts how they are and will be looking at arrangements of objects and information. Highly recommended to students and researchers of business, social sciences, education, and library science. It adds another dimension to the latter field and should be recommended reading for its students and faculty.-Lucy Heckman, St. John's Univ. Lib., Jamaica, NY Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.
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CAME ACROSS THIS ARTICLE ON WEINBERGER ON SOMEONE ELSES BLOG
http://blog.kennisland.nl/kennisland/archive/2007/09/weinberger_very_miscellaneous_.html
Weinberger: very miscellaneous
Published by Joanne van den Eijnden September 27th, 2007 in Digitale Content, Creatieve Industrie, web 2.0, Media
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Isn’t ‘miscellaneous’ one of the most beautiful words in the English language? It resonates as a happy clutter of things more or less useful, for stuff that can’t be pigeonholed. And the good news is that according to David Weinberger (The Berkman centre for Internet & Society, Harvard) our world has become miscellaneous.
Some people, like Andrew Keen (The Cult of the Amateur), see our culture going to shreds because of the Internet. Sure, Weinberger agrees, most of the web is crap. But first of all, he informs the PICNIC public, it’s our crap and second: we don’t look at the whole web, we couldn’t. You can’t see the scene. We see what is filtered for us. And how we find things has changed radically since we live in a hyperlinked world.
As Weinberger argues in his ‘Everything is miscellaneous‘ we’ve internalized our lust for order: we believe the world has an underlying structure, so we must order the world. We used to do that paper-based and that way of working has structured our thinking. In a paper-based world everything can have only one place. A book can’t physically be in two places at the same time. So when we order books, e.g. in a library, we can put a book in just one section. So “Gone with the wind” has it’s place in the ‘civil war’ section. Although it could be well argued that the ‘romance’ corner would be more suited.
The ordering of books in different sections is what Weinberger calls the ‘second order’. In the above example a book in a library is ‘first order’; it’s a book on a shelf. The second order comes in when we use metadata to describe the book, and thus also decide the book’s place in our system. This way of ordering is what some of us remember from primary school. Remember when you entertained your classmates with a ten-minute talk about ‘our dog’? To fill those ten minutes you needed more than just your observations of your pet, so you took a trip to the library to browse a paper catalogue. Searching through the fiches and wondering if there was also specific information on Rottweilers.
Well, those times lay behind us. It’s all digital now. And that means data and metadata come together in the ‘third order’. It’s no longer necessary to go to the right shelve for a book. On Amazon you can find “Gone with the wind” in many categories, as well as searching by author name or words from the title. The metadata is no longer restricted to a few terms describing the book. You can use as many tags as you like. And the book itself becomes metadata. You can type ‘Scarlett’ or “Frankly… I don’t give a damn” in Google and not only will the book title pop up. Most likely Google books will provide you with a digitalized version of the book.
Messiness, concludes Weinberger, is a virtue.
Thanks for recommending this, Anita
I have ordered it for our library
Bye
Eileen Shepherd
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