Everything is Miscellaneous

Everything is Miscellaneous: the power of the new digital disorder.
by David Weinberger

Problems with physical space: Staples example. Physical things can only be in one place and in one configuration. Atoms have limitations that digital data does not have.

Order: People have always tried to put things in order but things have many possible orders, all valid in some circumstances. We like things to be be neat and on order. It gives us a feeling of control. But there is too much information for it to be kept in order.

The three orders of order: (1) We put the things themselves in order (2) we put the references (card catalog) of the things in order (or in several orders). These two orders arrange atoms. (3) the third order is digital.

Alphabetization: He goes through the history of it. It is essentially arbitrary but at least it puts some order on things.

Mortimer Adler: He hated alphabetization, he wanted to put a more logical order on all knowledge. To find the joints of nature.

Book to get: Ian Hacking The Social Construction of What?

Social contruction: Denies that there is a natural order to anything. All divisions are arbitrary.

Dewey Decimal System: Tried to categorize knowledge. Now it seems outdated.

Amazon: Uses search and other people to make categories. Has many categories.

Twenty questions: Teaches you that the world is organized into neat categories, but this is no longer true of the digital age.

Lists: We like to keep lists but lists need to (1) be about something and (2) is compiled for a reason. In Jorge Juis Borges's essay "the Analytical Language of John Wilkins" he gives a crazy list that violates these two rules.

Metadata: Sometimes lists have metadata: a shopping list for items from several stores. Metadata needs to be clearly indicated and it makes the list in a hierarchy.

Lumps and Splits: Maps split off areas from other areas and clump together the things inside an area. Lumpers and splitters are technical terms among professional indexers. Some people like to combine things and some people like to split things.

Nests in Trees: Nesting is a fundamental technique for human understanding. Maybe the fundamental technique. Trees are wonderful organization tools. Trees are tied with the physical. Digital technology allows us to go beyond trees.

Linneas: was big into trees! His system worked well and is still working. But it is based on a fixed tree. It is beginning to break down with all the new kingdoms.

Facets: Invented by the librarian S. R. Ranganathan. He wanted to make libraries more user-friendly. Facets allow a large number of hierarchies. Any facet can be at the root.

Nesting without fixed trees: Nesting is important and is the basis for language and knowledge. But you don't need fixed trees. They can be generated dynamically.

Tagging leaves: There is a bias against miscellaneous but order can sometimes hide things. Better to tag things and allow many orders or hierarchies.

Fixed trees are only possible when a powerful body mandates them. Tagging can be used in situations of distributed power.

His examples: delicious, flikr, the BBC, wikipedia.

Properties of traditional knowledge (old view):
We need a single, comprehensive framework of knowledge with clear and comprehensive categories.

There is one reality, hence one knowledge, the same for all. If two people have contradictory beliefs then one of them must be wrong. Knowledge is an accurate representation of reality. Anything else is "relativism" or "postmodern".
Reality is not ambiguous and neither is knowledge. Ambiguous things exist but are not knowledge.
We need people to act as filters for knowledge because there is too much for one person to comprehend. We need expects to tell us what is good information and what is bad information.
Experts need to work their way up social institutions.

New principles of knowledge:

Filter on the way out, not on the way in. xxx
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