A modest review of ‘Everything Is Miscellaneous’

How is the Internet reshaping our ideas about organizing information — and, in many ways, our ideas about organizing our lives? One of our keenest cultural observers, David Weinberger, helps frame the discussion in illuminating ways in his new book, Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder.

I’ve seen David enthrall audiences at Harvard and at NewComm Forum in Las Vegas, and if I could find a way to get paid for blogging his talks, I happily would. (A caveat: David is a colleague and friend, and I did a hallway video interview with him about his book in March here.)

In Miscellaneous, Weinberger — who wrote Small Pieces Loosely Joined and co-authored The Cluetrain Manifesto before this — lays out a sort of epistemology of the information age, holding up a lens to  help us make sense of the new ways in which we are ordering and classifying the world around us.

He lays out his thesis this way:

From management structures to encyclopedias, to the courses of study we put our children through, to the way we decide what’s worth believing, we have organized our ideas with principles designed for use in a world limited by the laws of physics.

Suppose that now, for the first time in history, we are able to arrange our concepts without the silent limitations of the physical. How might our ideas, organizations, and knowledge itself change?

As a fellow friend, Ethan Zuckerman, writes on Amazon.com: "[The book is] about the shape of knowledge, and how moving information from paper to the web changes how we organize and how we think. … At its heart, the book is about what happens when we liberate knowledge from the world of atoms."

In one chapter, the author surveys the "weirdly out of date" Dewey Decimal Classification system, whose  century-old requirements seems to put a straitjacket around major new disciplines while consigning venerable religions like Buddhism to a lesser order because of the system’s built-in shortcomings. "The Dewey Decimal Classification system can’t be fixed because knowledge itself is unfixed," he writes. "Knowledge is diverse, changing, imbued with the cultural values of the moment. The world is too diverse for any single classification system to work for everyone in every culture at every time."

Wikipedia, the people’s encyclopedia, comes in for a thorough examination. How can this extraordinary example of democratic mob rule possibly work? Partly because it is blatantly transparent about its messy inner workings. As Weinberger notes, "Wikipedia provides the metadata surrounding an article — edits, discussions, warnings, links to other edits by the contributors — because it expects the reader to be actively involved, alert to the signs. … Deciding what to believe is now our burden."

Weinberger brings up familiar themes: of the decentralized nature of the Internet, of the Web as "a permission-free zone," of Flickr and tagging and the value of bottom-up, loosely coupled metadata.

He posits a not-too-distant day when electronic books will have a living memory, when readers will be able to see "the passages most often reread by poets, A students, professors of literature, or Buddhist priests. … We will be able to see what books our town is reading and which books our town has abandoned halfway through. Reading will cease being a one-way activity."

These kinds of observations infuse many of the book’s chapters, though by book’s end I was hoping for a Grand Theory of the Miscellaneous Everything, a connecting of the metadata dots that the author so skillfully lays out. What are the ramifications of this overarching trend for our arts, our industries, our politics, our culture?

I don’t have as much time as I once did to read books, but a recent cross-country plane ride was well spent, as I had in hand a book that changed how I think about the way the world works.

See David’s Everything Is Miscellaneous blog.

Order the book at these online retailers.

See my other book reviews.

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.