Everything Is Miscellaneous:The Power of the New Digital Disorder
by David Weinberger
I read this a couple months ago but have now only just had a chance to summarize my reading of it. Dr. Weinberger is a contributor to The Cluetrain Manifesto (I’ve read the manifesto years ago but am reading the group of associated essays) who has a previous book that I’d also like to read: “Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web” – maybe later this year.
Dr. Weinberger’s premise is that the digitization of data points is changing “everything”. Let’s be a little more clear, it’s not just just the digitization of data points, it’s the treatment of any and all information as data points (that are then digitized). The book is dedicated “To the Librarians” and the Dewey Decimal System is one of a dozen or so systems whose histories are examined and compared to current systems. The story of the Dewey Decimal System is amazingly ridiculous – the fact that for decades libraries have been using such a skewed and unworkable system and that the bureaucracy in place won’t let it be updated or adjusted while systems continue to advance around it seems to only ensure the irrelevance of the organizations that use the system. Weinberger does the ultimate comparison of the Dewey vs. Amazon (old vs. new; inefficient vs. scalable; and a system couched in all kinds of bias and prejudice vs. a system based on data and usage metrics; etc.).
It’s easy to grasp Weinberger’s idea that any subject/oject/item/node/mode has a set of data associated with it, a list that is lumped together with other lists or split into separate lists and it’s easy to understand why the organizations and companies he points to as success stories are successful because they have embraced and exploited this idea. What is hard to understand is how the organizations that actually create data are supposed to survive in the world that Weinberger envisions. Smart people who know how to organize and reorganize data, metadata, and the relationships between them can only be successful in a world where the data exists in the first place. Look at the struggle that newspapers are facing today: they are closing up shop one by one, and while there are millions of blogs with writers who opine about the specifics in news articles, the sources for these articles are disappearing. How are sources for data and research to be funded and maintained so that they remain independent entities?
Weinberger doesn’t address this at all – perhaps he’s saving it for his next book? How isn’t everything miscellaneous he asks? Without multiple sources of unbiased and independent data, the admired architects of arrangement will be presenting us with arrays that will have questionable relevance.
1 Response to “David Weinberger’s “Everything Is Miscellaneous””