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Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, jumps all over the place for the entirety, almost in a “miscellaneous” way, author David Weinberger brings his point together nicely in the end. Weinberger starts his discussion off with a topic that is all around us; information and how it is sorted.
Weinberger credits iTunes with coming up with a “parsimonious” information sorting system, but is also quick to note that we should never believe that one certain way is the best way of organizing the world. Weinberger follows up this assessment by stating that everyone has a certain way of finding places for things, and how the digital world is helping this process. The digital world is allowing things to be assigned to multiple places simultaneously, and saving people a lot of time and space.
The second part of the book, or as Weinberger refers to it, the “2nd Order”, discusses how “organization” is the use of metadata to organize and categorize physical objects i.e. library card catalogs. This is still limited by physical constraints and has cause a pile up of information and “stuff” throughout history.
The 3rd order, is what Weinberger is referring to in his title, `Everything is Miscellaneous’. This is where he brings it all together. In a world where we can organize information any way we want, nothing needs to be categorized per-se and everything can live in a state of limbo in the miscellaneous category until we need it and then, and only then, does it need to be grouped, filtered, sorted for our immediate consumption.
The 3rd order world has freed information and people to categorize information anyway they want. It is no longer an academic exercise to come up with taxonomies. With tools like Digg, del.icio.us, Flickr etc. we slice and dice the world of information to our personal needs.
Understanding this digital disorder we live in and how we cope is the ultimate point of this book. True to form, Weinberger has given us a wealth of information to ultimately understand where we are today and how to build the tools to cope in the future.
You will come away from this book understanding the following:
- Our historical struggle to organize information from the physical to the digital
- That we live in a new reality where information is freed from its physical constraints.
- The world of information is now available to all of us and can now be organized any way we want.
Filed under: Book Reports, Book Reviews, Emergence, Emergent Pattern, Emergent Patterns, Emergent Search, Emergent Systems, Emergent Web, Folksonomy, Library Science, Tagging, Tags
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Great post! I can’t wait to read the book as well as Keen.
Does Weinberger have any unique solutions for folks trying to keep up with their digital lives?
Does he think anything should be changed?
If I’ve already read Cluetrain and Naked Conversations, but not Long Tail or Wisdom of Crowds do you recommend this or something else?
Nathan, Weinberger lays out four “new” strategic principles that are emerging, which might answer your questions about him having solutions for folks trying to keep up with their digital lives and his feelings on whether or not things should be changed. He claims that these principles are now “severing the ties between the way we organize physical objects and ideas.” His first suggestion is to “filter on the way out, no on the way in.” He claims that filtering your information on the way in decreases the value of your abundance of resources by ruling out items that might be of great value to a few people. He feels that filtering information on the way out, on the other hand, increases the value of the abundance by locating what’s of value to a particular person at that particular moment. This system thus makes the information that you hold that much more valuable. He gives and example of a physics professor at McGill University that “started an electronic bulletin board that posts new findings for any astronomy research as soon as it can be summarized.” The professor doesn’t apply any criteria to decide for the reader whether the research is important enough to be included; it is up to the reader to be the filterer. It is almost as if Marketing Conversation is run this way. We all have the freedom to post knowledge. Then, the more eyes that glance upon this knowledge, the more filtering gets done, thus leaving us with a succinct, cohesive, valuable idea.
Weinberger’s second principle is to “put each leaf on as many branches as possible.” He explores how it is to our advantage to “hang” information in as many places as possible. His example deals with a digital camera that you want to sell in your online store. By listing “its under as many categories as you can think of, including cameras, travel gear, Casio products, graduation gifts, new items, sale items, and perhaps even sports equipment,” it makes that product/information more usable to the “customer” and thus more profitable.
His third principle for us to follow is that “everything is metadata and everything can be a label.” This principle may be more useful for people looking to sell books, but it still is a good suggestion for anyone. He gives an example of how not only can every word in a book count as metadata (which can be searched for), but also any of the sources that link to the book itself. This will not only make sites easier to use, but it also vastly increases the level of knowledge based on the connections.
His final “suggestion” is for us to “give up control.” He almost knocks his second principle with this statement. He understands why building a “tree” may help you surface information that might otherwise be hidden, but seems to be more of an advocate of building a “big pile” of miscellaneous information. He states that you will come across more relationships that would otherwise be unrecognizable. To clarify this point, he uses an example from iTunes, one of his favorite references throughout the book. Weinberger declares that “iTunes shows users a branch that pulls together albums by a particular artist, but the millions of playlists that users have made there find relationships that the organizers of iTunes could not possibly have foreseen, from techno versions of children’s songs to tracks played at someone’s third wedding.” Putting it simply, the owners of information no longer own the organization of that information.
Hopefully this gave you a little more insight into what Weinberger is bringing to the plate in the ever-changing digital world. I am not familiar with the other books that you have listed, but I can tell you that Everything is Miscellaneous is definitely a must read and really pushes the envelope of while giving great analysis of the new digital order.
Thanks for the awesome response!! I have a couple ideas in regard to two of Weinberger’s principles.
>>Weinberger’s second principle is to “put each leaf on as many branches as possible.”
This seems to risk spam, although I’m sure he covers this in the book. Also, I guess if you legitimately add value then the accusation of spam is less true.
>>His third principle for us to follow is that “everything is metadata and everything can be a label.”
I think that this is important, especially to the extent that Flickr photos of people with tags about emotion are literally twice as valuable because there is far more context. Alternatively, i think this proposition taken to its literal extreme makes tags entirely useless. Although, I’m sure he takes both of these criticisms into effect. Thanks again for your insight!
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Nathan, thanks for the questions, and Kevin, thanks for the awesome response (as Nathan notes). Did I mention that it was awesome?
Nathan, the principles that I point to I intend to be in contrast to how we’ve managed info before the digital age. Before, we thought the perfect organization - the one that mirrored the way the world is - had each item (”leaf”) in exactly one category (”branch”). So, we had to decide if Pluto really is a planet or platypuses (platypi?) are mammals. In the digital age, it’s usually helpful to put things into as many categories as you can. Since spammers want their stuff to show up everywhere, they too will try to put it into multiple categories. E.g., they’ll tag their detergent as “britney,” But, tagging systems have a natural inhibitor against spam since tagging relies on aggregating lots of people’s tags. It’s not perfect, but then what is?
As for your second point, I do mean it literally, yet I think tags remain useful as metadata. But not just tags. Think of all the ways you could now unearth a page about, say, “Moby-Dick.” Tags might take you there. So might reviews. Blogs. Bibliographies. A whale sighting tour page might point at it, as might an anti-whaling page. You could get from Emerson to the page in 2 clicks at most. And you could even randomly extract a sentence from the book and find the page that way. Everything now links to everything else, although you may have to stop at Kevin Bacon’s page first. That makes it much easier to go from what you know to what you’re looking for.
Thanks again, Kevin and Nathan.
– David Weinberger
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