KonzeptioNerd

Everything is Miscellaneous

David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Disorder makes a great tandem read to Norbert Bolz’s bang design and Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things. Weinberger, too, is dealing with things gone out of control. But when items break out of their traditional categories, Weinberger gets all excited and fired up.

Everything takes the long route, explaining about taxonomy in Biology, Library studies and the history of several different cataloging systems, to arrive at and skirt tagging for some more “first” and “second” order ordering. But by the second half, we seem to have enough background under our belts to dive headlong into the “third” order where things are tagged instead of categorized. It’s funny, though, how in his praise of disorder, Weinberger pulls up three distinct orders as signposts, if nothing else.

In the miscellaneous order, a topic is anything someone somewhere is interested in. (208)

Books, like experts, are valued because of the knowledge they contain … . (205/6)

… in the third order, we can tag ideas in as many categories as we wish. (212)

The meaning of a particular thing is enabled by the web of implicit meanigns we call the world. (170)

Simplicity was the only reasonable strategy before we developed machines that can handle massive amounts of data and metadata. (182)

… the public construction of meaning is the most important project of the next hundred years. (222)

Everyting … also tandems nicely (though uncomfortably) with Morvielle and Rosenfeld’s Information Architecture for the World Wide Web.

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