Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger (PDF)

Description

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

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Don’t be bamboozled by David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. Puffery on the outside, there’s propaganda within.A booster of Internet-enabled consumer-generated content, Weinberger hails all its new modes–social networks, tagging, folksonomies, wikis, mash-ups etc.–to argue that the Internet enables new bottom-up ways of organizing and creating knowledge. His two theses are irrefutable. First, information is getting chopped into smaller and smaller pieces. Second, the organization of information has escaped physical world constraints and control by experts and their institutions.The net result: any one can now organize information any way one wants to suit one’s own purposes and do so at any time for one’s immediate use. From this potential Weinberger foresees though rose-colored glasses an ever-changing array of “useful, powerful and beautiful ways to make sense of our world.” Excuse me but such a view has huge problems.As Weinberger points out, the best grouping and sorting of information into knowledge is done by small groups not only online but also offline, as his own examples demonstrate. The Internet brings nothing special to this process. To be sure, the Internet does make it much easier to form groups and very much easier to form groups that include strangers and groups devoted to narrow topics. But a vast increase in quantity does not necessarily yield any improvement in quality, and although Weinberger is always careful to label such an outcome as “potential,” I’ve yet to see any marked change in our ability to make sense of the world.Nor is the appetite and aptitude for this activity suited to all. As any teacher who ever graded term papers will confirm, the ability to cut-and-paste information and turn it into knowledge is not innate. Even after some schooling, such a rudimentary skill is very far from universal. It is essential for the new occupational stratum of Information Age employees who manipulate words and numbers for their livings, but such “knowledge workers” are not Everyman. Presenting the abilities and interests of this or any other elite as those of everyone is the essence of ideology and shouldn’t fool anyone.Nor should anyone accept, much less applaud, Weinberger’s cavalier dismissal of discipline and authority. He argues that knowledge should not have any shape and that deciding what to believe is now our burden. His laissez-faire alternative would have John and Jane Doe fend for themselves, finding and creating meaning from and among each other–link by link, tag by tag. Fortunately, this cannot happen because humans can only make sense of things, especially disconnected facts, through the frameworks of our inherited arts and sciences. Nor should it happen. The casual indifference to several millennia of human efforts to make sense of the world only leaves John and Jane in the post-modern void, unarmed and aimless.There’s a lot to be said in favor of consumer-generated content but to suggest that the fragmentation of knowledge and the cacophony of cyberspace will improve our ability to make sense and meaning of life is cybertopian bunkum.

⭐This book speaks to the aching sense of futility experienced by all you organizational freaks. The reason your office or computer desktop folders are never perfect, and as a result you are not perfectly organized, is that you have not had perfect tools. Alas, the world does not fit into nested folders and file drawers … no matter how clever you name them. We’ve always intuitively known this but David Wienberger gets specific about it. Along the way you’ll learn that the folks managing the Dewey Decimal System have a more frustrating (hopeless?) organizational/taxonomical job than you do … so you should feel better (or at least you should not feel alone).David Wienberger goes deep on what software and more generally the internet has done to help us organize knowledge in the world. He illuminates our movement from first order organization (the library shelf), to second order (creating a library card catalogue to find that book), to third order (collective development and meta tagging of information as found in online tools like flikr, delicious, wikipedia, and others). The book begins to describe how mankind will keep intellectual order given the explosion of constantly changing information. The short answer to that “how” question is: we will no longer simply put information into discrete real or virtual folders. Instead we will actually begin to create broad information about each element of information (meta-data). More importantly we will do this collectively and share it widely.Wienberger’s sense is that we are organizing the worlds information steadily into structures that actually better mimic how the human mind works. We are bringing our information toolsets closer to us and as a result are making information and knowledge more accessible and useful. Wienberger’s implication is that we will all spend less time organizing and more time making use of information. Great news unless you’re a compulsive obsessive organizer. Read this book to find out what’s driving many things you see on the internet including meta tagging, wikipedia, flickr, google, digg, and beyond.

⭐I really enjoyed the book. As someone who tags everything and is really focused on keeping my iPhoto library organized the concepts presented really appealed to me. I’d jumped into tagging and never considered the fact that it does hide other information. Yet another example of extremes – somewhere in the middle is a happy medium.A couple of things that stuck with me:- Wikis reduce emails by about 75%; I want to test this theory in real life!- The discussion of org charts was interesting. Corporate hierarchies don’t seem to make sense. The social connection follows the work connection. These are the important relationships.- I really like the idea of ‘Daily Me’ fragments as quoted from Nicholas Negroponte.- An article is neutral when people have stopped changing it.- The idea that we’re misleading CEOs by telling them it’s an information business. Makes me think that it’s really a relationship business. Information is used to establish, promote and measure the relationship.I read recently that 50% of internet users don’t understand tagging.I would like to dive deeper into usage patterns of organization. I see 2 ways of tagging something: (1) tagging the content directly (e.g. delicious) or (2) putting the content into a container – the container is effectively the tab – this could be single or multiple containers (think iTunes)

⭐Reading a book on categorisation and classification? Don’t tell you friends, if you have any, in my case I have now be labelled under Boring…A very good book and quite readable given the subject matter. You will learn more about classifying and the shortcomings thereof than you will have learnt in your life (unless you are already an expert.) Excellent stuff and the only reason it doesn’t have 5 stars is that Weinberger doesn’t cover those items which are fixed within a particular organisation such as a ‘sales order’ or ‘terms and conditions’. Sometimes things are simpler than he says!

⭐fantastic brilliant amazing superb good

⭐Phenomenal book. Lots of great observations. Very well written. Can thoroughly recommend.

⭐Das Buch zeigt, wie die Strukturen der Ordnung und Organisation geschichtlich gewachsen und durch Konvention als einziger Weg gesetzt sind. Alternativen Bibliotheken zu Ordnen oder andere Items nach Systemen zu ordnen werden aussen vorgelassen. die eine Ordnung ist die wahre Ordnung. Im digitalen Zeitalter werden diese linearen, “wahren” Strukturen jedoch durch Tagging und Querverweise, durch die Vielfalt im Netz, in Frage gestellt. Was das für unser Denken, unser gemeinsames Handeln und für unser Wissen heisst, beleuchtet der Autor umfassend, einleuchtend und sehr spannend. Auf jeder Seite gibt es einen AHA-Effekt.Viel Spaß bei der Lektüre….

⭐Not found.

⭐This book just pulls so many things upside down..which is actually true..organization, structure itself take new meanings..This book has inspired me to look at information around me and arrive at new never before looked at interpretations…the examples on Amazon, Colon classification are really useful..

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