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.
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