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    Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder
    Unavailable
    Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder
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    Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder
    Ebook367 pages6 hours

    Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder

    By David Weinberger

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Business visionary and bestselling author David Weinberger shows how the digital revolution is radically changing the way we make sense of our lives

    Human beings are information omnivores: we are constantly collecting, labeling, and organizing data. But today, the shift from the physical to the digital is mixing, burning, and ripping our lives apart. In the past, everything had its one place—the physical world demanded it—but now everything has its places: multiple categories, multiple shelves. Simply put, everything is suddenly miscellaneous.


    In Everything Is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger charts the new principles of digital order that are remaking business, education, politics, science, and culture. In his rollicking tour of the rise of the miscellaneous, he examines why the Dewey decimal system is stretched to the breaking point, how Rand McNally decides what information not to include in a physical map (and why Google Earth is winning that battle), how Staples stores emulate online shopping to increase sales, why your children's teachers will stop having them memorize facts, and how the shift to digital music stands as the model for the future in virtually every industry. Finally, he shows how by "going miscellaneous," anyone can reap rewards from the deluge of information in modern work and life.


    From A to Z, Everything Is Miscellaneous will completely reshape the way you think—and what you know—about the world.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateMay 1, 2007
    ISBN9781429927956
    Unavailable
    Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder
    Author

    David Weinberger

    From the earliest days of the web, David Weinberger, PhD, has been a pioneering thought leader about the internet's effect on our lives, on our businesses, and most of all, on our ideas. He has contributed in a remarkably wide range of fields, from marketing to libraries to politics to journalism and more. And he has contributed in a remarkably wide range of ways: as the author of books that have made a difference; a writer for journals from Wired, Scientific American, and Harvard Business Review to TV Guide; an acclaimed keynote speaker around the world; a strategic marketing VP and consultant; a teacher; an internet adviser to presidential campaigns; an early social-networking entrepreneur; the codirector of a groundbreaking library innovation lab; a researcher at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, at Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, and at the US State Department as a Franklin Fellow; and always a passionate advocate for an open internet. Dr. Weinberger's doctorate is in philosophy from the University of Toronto. Author social media/website info: hyperorg.com/blogger/, twitter.com/dweinberger

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    Reviews for Everything Is Miscellaneous

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    • 3/5
      This book takes a critical look at organizational structures, with a particular emphasis on Dewey and library classification schemes. Since reading this book, I've become nearly obsessed with the author's indication that the 2nd order (i.e. library catalogs) are regularly bypassed in favor of the 3rd order (i.e. amazon.com) and I'm embarrassed by what we librarians are hanging on to in terms of outdated classification systems. Embarrassed!
    • 5/5
      Fascinating. I've been using tagging more and more - here on LibraryThing, in Evernote, etc - but I hadn't really thought about the underlying meanings. Weinberger did, and lays them out nicely - first-order arranging actual things (books on a shelf), second-order arranging references (card catalog), third-order tags which are not arranged, just randomly scattered about - but can be organized immediately into whatever order the individual wants at the moment (all the books by X about Y, all the books tagged SF (for the various possible meanings of SF)...). One interesting facet is that he was writing in 2007, and forecast some things ten years ahead...to now. He got most of them wrong, of course (There won't be much editing left to do on Wikipedia, just polishing...), but it's a fascinating look at how he saw things.
    • 4/5
      Excellent book. Lots of inspiration.
    • 4/5
      Excellent introduction to classification systems, with a lot of anecdotes and examples. Weinbergers main point is that while classification systems for physical objects can have only one order, computer organized classification systems can have endless different orders and subsets. So there is no need to impose the limitations of physical classification systems onto the digital domain.

      Weinberger's presetation of the book at GoogleTalks in 2007 will give you an excellent condesed explanation of the book (in 1 hour), but the book is so vivid that I recommend both the talk and the book.

      Must read for all (wannabe) librarians and people who organize information on the web.
    • 4/5
      Tim Spalding, founder of LibraryThing, has declared David Weinberger to be its patron saint. And I, as a self professed LibraryThing addict, of course had to read his book Everything Is Miscellaneous. Plus, it's right up my professional alley of information science. In fact, it could have very well been an overview of many of the concepts covered in my foundation courses at the University of Michigan's School of Information. That being said, it isn't really an introduction to those concepts; unless readers already have some subject familiarity, they probably won't find the book to be particularly enlightening, but instead confusing (especially as he doesn't always define his language very well).Weinberger outlines three "orders of order." The first order is how we organize objects themselves; where and how they are placed physically. The second order is select information about those objects that is gathered and organized physically (an example being the good ol' library card catalog). In the third order, this information has become digital and is no longer subject to physical constraints; it has become dynamic.From the book's title, I expected Weinberger to focus more on this third order than he did. Although it was helpful, and even important, to explain and give concrete (and anecdotal, for that matter) examples of the first and second orders, he seemed to get kind of stuck there. All very interesting, rest assured, but not exactly what I was hoping for or expecting. Instead of giving in-depth information on what the third order can do, it seemed to me that he spent most of his time detailing what the second order could not. He also isn't very specific in how the third order is accomplished in a useful way. He does give some general examples, and alludes to what it could all mean, but I didn't find much new or concrete in his arguments.I wouldn't describe his writing as witty, but it was certainly approachable and at times even amusing. A fairly decent overview, certainly nothing too terribly in-depth, and fairly quick and easy to read. I had a little trouble at times knowing exactly what he was talking about because he didn't always define the terms he was using very well. Overall though, pretty good and worthwhile; I'll be holding onto my copy.Experiments in Reading
    • 4/5
      Weinberger proposes that the possibilities for ordering information in the digital and networked world can completely change the way we approach knowledge and learning. To make his point, he nicely summarizes organizational schemes of the past including the alphabet, good old Mevil Dewey, Linnaeus, Ranganathan (woo!), the card catalog, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and many more. His overviews are fun to read, well-researched, and deep enough to make his point without getting sidetracked. He then contrasts these traditional methods of organization with the Web 2.0 variety, leaning heavily on Flickr and Wikipedia as examples of tagging and social creation of content. In the end, he points us in the direction of a world filled with user-generated content and context where the interconnections are as important as the information itself, and where creativity and knowledge are found in the spaces between my ideas and your ideas.This is all pretty heady stuff, but Weinberger is a very readable philosopher who gives his readers plenty of concrete examples to latch onto. Occasionally I found myself getting a little huffy (why, oh why, does he constantly use the card catalog as his illustration of how libraries organize things and never mention the OPAC? Why no mention of brick and mortor libraries that are incorporating Web 2.0 into their cataloging and public access? Why are libraries implicitly lumped in with "the man" who is keeping information out of the hands of the masses? How would he handle providing access to collections that are both physical and digital?). But once I calmed down a little, most of my qualms ended up being addressed elsewhere in the book, or could easily be dismissed by the fact that Weinberger isn't writing a book about libraries or archives, there is just a lot of overlap in what we are trying to accomplish.This is a great book to read if you are a librarian, a library-wanna-be, an archivist, a techie, a scholar, a Flickr user, a philosopher, or just some jerk who likes to find things on the Internet.
    • 4/5
      If I hadn't just finished a Masters degree in Library and Information Science I may have been more engrossed with Everything is Miscellaneous- David Weinberger's look at the contemporary issues of knowledge classification in our digital environments. He does, however, write entertainingly on the subject and provides an array of appropriate examples to bolster his arguments. A light and readable introduction to these issues.
    • 5/5
      Not a flawless book, but definitely an important book. I've been using it for 3 semesters to teach a class on information architecture and research methods and I've yet to find a more recent alternative that addresses what it means to organize and find information in today's context more clearly and practically.
    • 3/5
      The author is an interesting man: he's a marketing consultant with a Ph.D. in philosophy who works at the Harvard Law School and advised Howard Dean's brief run for president. His book *The Cluetrain Manifesto* was memorably influential in 2001. He writes engagingly, informally, and clearly. Unfortunately, this book consists of ten chapters all saying the same thing: that we have moved past the age of classifying information in hierarchies and one-to-one relationships, and moved into the world of tagging and metadata. That's it. Each chapter simply explores this simple message from a slightly different angle.Frankly, and with no arrogance meant, I knew this already, and find most of its implications obvious. (News flashes: the Dewey Decimal System is out of date [chapter 3]. Wikis, especially Wikipedia, are effective repositories of knowledge [chapter 7]. Classifying things too restrictively is counterproductive [chapter 9].) So I did not find the book a "mind-opener" (BuzzMachine.com), it did not make a "profound contribution" to my understanding of "the impact of the digital revolution" (BBC Global News), and despite what Esther Dyson says, I will indeed look at a humble bookshelf or store shelf the same way again.Some of this is not the author's fault as much as it is the passage of time: it's 2015, and the book was written in 2007. Still, enough had happened by 2007 to make Scott Rosenberg of Salon.com's comment that the book shows "the benefits of moving from paper to bits" seem strangely out of time.For those who haven't yet got the message, this could be a useful book. For example, I want to send this passage to the leaders of the heavily siloed organization that signs my paychecks: "Thinking that people's skills are defined by the department they're in wastes their talent. (It also means that companies frequently start corporate blogs with the least interesting people—the marketers—as their initial bloggers.) [A business] should scribble over the lines of division with lines of connection. Every line that's drawn ought to be systematically smudged....Everything belongs in more than one place, at least a little bit."
    • 4/5
      If I hadn't just finished a Masters degree in Library and Information Science I may have been more engrossed with Everything is Miscellaneous- David Weinberger's look at the contemporary issues of knowledge classification in our digital environments. He does, however, write entertainingly on the subject and provides an array of appropriate examples to bolster his arguments. A light and readable introduction to these issues.
    • 2/5
      Read the title and you're done.
    • 2/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      In this book, David Weinberger calls for a total re-thinking of the definition of metadata itself. For him, "metadata is what you already know and data is what you are are trying to find out" (p.104), making the existing definition of 'data about data' untenable. This surely will have greater implications on the way metadata is created, used and maintained. This also has implications on the choice of number of metadata elements, if that itself will remain relevant at all. One may raise a question, on how much metadata is enough? Who gets to decide on metadata elements, to what extent metadata reflects the user' expectations and most importantly what philosophical and theoretical perspectives guide metadata creation?David Weinberger fiercely criticise current metadata models and he argues that these limitations "on how we have organized information have not only limited our vision, they have given the people who control the organization of information more power than those who create the information" (p 89). I found this book very appealing and I strongly recommend it to my LIS friends.
    • 5/5
      Okay - prepare yourself for a rave. To say I loved this book is an understatement. I couldn't get enough of it. You simply must read it. I flagged just about every page with a yellow sticky until it got embarrassing. If you are wondering what all the fuss is about when it comes to digital or social media or the power of the world wide web, this is the book to inspire you. Weinberger tells a good story, lots in fact. He pulls everything together seamlessly and, it seems, effortlessly. He is my new personal hero. As you can tell he has reduced me to a blithering devotee. Oooh...and he's a Librarything author....off to check out his collection of miscellanea.....
    • 4/5
      Fast read, and interesting insights. He talks about first order organization, in which physical things must be stored in physical locations, so we have a place for everything and everything in its place. For example, a book is placed in one location on a library shelf or knowledge organized like that such as the robin is placed in its appropriate branch of the Linneaen tree of life as a bird, which is a creature with a backbone, which is part of the animal kingdom. Second order organization comes of realizing that a book can be represented by meta-data, such as information about its subject, its author, its title, and perhaps a few key words. Several cards with this metadata can then be organized into a card catalog that allows one to find the book knowing only one of those things. But physical catalog cards are still limited in what they can do, and how much metadata can be stored.Finally, third order organization takes the constraints of physical reality away. You can look up a book by a phrase, such as "But soft, what light through yonder window breaks", and get to the physical copy of "Romeo and Juliet" if you need to. And Robin can be related not only to birds through the Linnean tree, but to dinosaurs through DNA, or bats because it flies, or worm predators, or what have you. And the power of that third level of organization, where everything is miscellaneous, but that has meta-information associated with it to allow searching on topics that do not need to be envisioned ahead of time, is the concept this book discusses.It is a one-idea book, and introduces it well. There may be more to the idea, but the world has not looked at its components, and its metadata, through this lens for long. As our culture absorbs this idea, and uses it, it changes our fundamental way of working with information and organization. While not directly mentioned in the book, I found myself ruminating on several related topics - First order organization says a thing is either this or that - e.g., a Rottwieler or a Laborador Retreiver. Third order organization says that a thing can be mostly this, but a little bit that - so a puppy of the two dogs can belong partly to both branches.It appears to also be related to Fuzzy logic, in which something is identified as perhaps 80% this, and 20% that, and how to deal with that uncertainty. A book that provides lots to think about, and changes the way one thinks about the world.
    • 3/5
      Interesting and enjoyable read, but short on big ideas.
    • 3/5
      This book challenges the concept that information requires professional intervention for retrieval and access. Weinberger makes a valid argument as to the power and necessity of collective organizing in the digital world. I appreciated to number of references to current digital information social sites.
    • 5/5
      This book was an interesting look at how the digitisation of information reduces the need for formal classification skills, because we classify things in the way that makes sense to us in the moment. Information is moving away from a tree structure and toward a graph structure. This book was pretty good, but the authors tributes to miscellany at the end were a bit...corny.
    • 4/5
      This was remarkably fun for being work-related. A lot of familiar names from library school -- Linnaeus, Mortimer Adler, Valdis Krebs. Lumpers and splitters. We didn't learn about interwingularity, though. Or, sadly, Freiherr Samual von Pufendorf. The 'it looks like chaos but it still works' angle was reassuring.
    • 4/5
      This was a fun book. Its central idea is that digital information can be organized in fundamentally different ways than previous information formats. Basically- before, with what Weinberger calls 1st and 2nd order organization, everything in an organizational structure can only exist in one place, a book can only have one Dewey Decimal Number, an animal can have only one place in a taxonomy. This is a limitation of physical media - a book might be about five different things, but you can only put it on the shelf in one place. With the digital medium, however, information can be categorized much more messily, comprehensively, and on the fly. Tagging is the best example of this: you can "categorize" something an indefinite number of times just by affixing tags to it that others can search for. The searching process calls up everything within a category without it having to be stored in category order.This book said a lot of the things I've been wanting to hear in library science. There is a lot of potential in this type of thinking that has not really been explored. Moreover, it was a fun read- very entertainingly written, with examples made from most of the interesting websites I could think of. And, hey, LibraryThing gets a mention, although just for the barcode scanners. A fun an interesting look at digital organization, or, if you want to look at it that way, and interesting tour through the more innovative corners of the internet. Four stars.
    • 3/5
      David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous is an entertaining and superficial examination of the characteristics of information and how it has been organized by people historically, as well as in today’s world, and potentially in the future. The ways in which information has been stored and manipulated in the past are used by Weinberger as evidence that humans have been bending and shaping information to fit our limitations as atom-based beings. The author believes that in the new digital world information no longer needs to be contorted to fit human behavior and abilities; rather, information can be collected digitally (where it has fewer atoms) and left uncategorized. Weinberger wanders through time and place in his book, recalling the origins of modern organization, such as the alphabet, Dewey, Ranganathan, Mendeleev’s periodical table, and even as far back as Aristotle and Plato and their philosophical ideas about classification. In doing so, the author illuminates several behaviors inherent to human organization and the limitations of the physical items people have attempted to sort. Throughout the book Weinberger touches on dozens of different topics to defend his thesis. He jumps from century to century, from country to country, all in an attempt to provide examples of the history of information organization and the potential for organization in the future. The author uses practical, fascinating real world examples of many aspects of organization. His enthusiasm is sincere, which makes his argument very convincing. Although the examples are very helpful, they seem to be strung together with little effort to provide context or to defend an ultimately fuzzy thesis. Unfortunately, the book as a whole is too superficial to create a sustainable argument, especially for the library field.
    • 5/5
      When I started this book, I found I kind of liked it. I read some more and started liking it more. By the end, I was a semi-rabid fan, going around suggesting to everyone that they ought to read it. Weinberger's style is fairly informal, down-to-earth, and entertaining, but not squishy enough to decrease his credibility--I found my views on organization changed as I read through this book, and it only increased my desire to go into metadata librarianship (cataloguing for men). Great, great book. The only book I'm going to finish this semester (and if you've seen my reading list, that's saying a lot).
    • 3/5
      A good popular non-fiction explanation of how digitization has changed the information science world. I might recommend that my brother and dad read it so they understand what I'm studying in school.
    • 5/5
      Always gratifying when an author uses many of my favorite sources, such as Chandler. This is a very interesting read with significant implications for our culture, how we deal with our own computers, and especially, what is going to happen to Gartner. As
    • 4/5
      Worthwhile reading, though there are some folksy anecdotes and asides that can easily be skipped. The historical references to the likes of Dewey, Mendeleev, their contemporaries and intellectual descendants are illuminating. The various attempts (in a wide array of fields) to put knowledge "in its proper place" have been fraught. One of the messages that came across to me is that in the "third order" (his phrase), the connections between bits of knowledge, and the meaning that can be derived from them, are as or even more important than the bits themselves.
    • 4/5
      The third order of data described in this book by David Weinberger is adding "Consciousness" to the world of Knowledge just as the human mind ads Consciousness to the physical world
    • 5/5
      A really good book about classification of information, and how it is done in the age of modern information technology. By looking at attempts to classify all known information (Dewey decimal etc) or parts of it (alphabet, table of elements) Weinberger shows the impossibility of that task, and how knowing is a dynamic and collective proces. There are a few places where he isn't that convincing, but all in all a thought provoking book, and you can't ask for much more than that.
    • 4/5
      I think the following quotation from the end of the book captures the spirit of Weinberger's work and illustrates the Internet's effect on knowledge, information management, and implicit meaning."For the first time, we have an infrastructure that allows us to hop over and around established categorizations with ease. We can make connections and relationships at a pace never before imagined. We are doing so together. We are doing so in public. Every hyperlink and every playlist enriches our shared miscellany, creating potential connections that we can't often anticipate. Each connection tells us something about the connected things, about the person who made the connection, about the culture in which a person could make such a connection, about the sorts of people who find that connection worth noticing. This is how meaning grows. Whether we're doing it on purpose or simply by leaving tracks behind us, the public construction of meaning is the most important project of the next hundred years" (221-222)If that quotation excites you, then I recommend you read this book.
    • 4/5
      Yet another book about the future of disintermediation.I'm going to use some of the examples in this book in my recent crusade for tagging at my company.
    • 4/5
      You think you know how to catalog a book. Think again as that book relies first on metadata to describe its contents or then goes digital where hundreds of tags may be assigned by readers who are trying to make sense of their information world. Our clients are cataloging now and they are not using Dewey, Sears, or LC. What does the Internet do to the organization of information? Worth thinking deeply about.