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Everything Is Miscellaneous

The Power of the New Digital Disorder

By David Weinberger

(43)

| Hardcover | 9780805080438

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Book Description

From Publishers Weekly
In a high-minded twist on the Internet-has-changed-everything book, Weinberger (Small Pieces Loosely Joined) joins the ranks of social thinkers striving to construct new theories around the success of Google and Wikipedia. Organization or, rather, lack of it, is the key: the author insists that "we have to get rid of the idea that there's a best way of organizing the world." Building on his earlier works' discussions of the Internet-driven shift in power to users and consumers, Weinberger notes that "our homespun ways of maintaining order are going to break—they're already breaking—in the digital world." Today's avalanche of fresh information, Weinberger writes, requires relinquishing control of how we organize pretty much everything; he envisions an ever-changing array of "useful, powerful and beautiful ways to make sense of our world." Perhaps carried away by his thesis, the author gets into extended riffs on topics like the history of classification and the Dewey Decimal System. At the point where readers may want to turn his musings into strategies for living or doing business, he serves up intriguing but not exactly helpful epigrams about "the third order of order" and "useful miscellaneousness." But the book's call to embrace complexity will influence thinking about "the newly miscellanized world." (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Think about how you organize your CD collection. Whether you're quirky or meticulous, once you pick a system, you're pretty much stuck with it. But in the digital world the laws of physics no longer apply. At iTunes you can sort music by any number of criteria, including artist, genre, song name, length, or price. The Internet itself is a hyperlinked web of information that we cruise organically, often finding ourselves far afield of where we started. Weinberger takes us on a journey through the human constructs of classification, from alphabetization through the Dewey decimal system, all necessary but limited approaches to organization that seem antiquated in the digital age. At places like Amazon.com and Wikipedia, an almost infinite ability to sort and combine objects and ideas produces results that range from the surprising to the ridiculous. This so-called third order mixes it all up; it's all about multiple connections and a realization that the world is not as orderly as we thought. Weinberger presents a thought-provoking and entertaining look at our rapidly evolving culture of data. David Siegfried
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved [강컴닷컴 제공]

5 Reviews

1 person find this helpful

A must-read for those who are working in the web industry & having a cognitive psychology background (like me!).
Think the book succeeds at giving a new perspective on how concepts/ items/ knowledge are organized, yet failed to give practical ways of how human can handle the miscellaneous inf ... (continue)

A must-read for those who are working in the web industry & having a cognitive psychology background (like me!).
Think the book succeeds at giving a new perspective on how concepts/ items/ knowledge are organized, yet failed to give practical ways of how human can handle the miscellaneous information world. But this is acceptable because you won't expect this philosophical book turns out to be a self-help for dummies.
The book also provides interesting contrasts with
- Andrew Keen's "The cult of the amateur" (on whether to embrace the "relativity view" of knowledge),
- Barry Schwartz's "The Paradox of Choice" (on whether the "include first and postpone organization/ filtering/ judgment later" strategy works for human psychological well-being), &
- Mark Hurst's "The Bit Literacy" (haven't started reading this one but expect it would provide ways for human to fight information overload).

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bark said on Aug 11, 2007 | Add your feedback

Dalla copertina:
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 McNa ... (continue)

Dalla copertina:
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.

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Domenico (Ingo) Bogliolo said on Mar 17, 2009 | Add your feedback

$15.22

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Jonas Nockert said on Jan 25, 2009 | Add your feedback

La recensione sul mio blog http://www.terraenuvole.com/everything-is-miscellaneous-di-david-weinberger/

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Sara said on Dec 27, 2008 | Add your feedback

Cool, but not sophisticated enough. Not enough treatment on fragmentization of information (an important consequence of the "misc" trend), for instance.

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Carpier said on Jul 28, 2007 | Add your feedback