1Everything is Miscellaneous
I just finished reading Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger. It’s quite a hot book around the office here. No surprise given our unique selling point is being able to tag products as part of the review process.
Basically the author argues that tagging will be the new way of organizing information. No more categories. While I agree with his basic idea, I’m not willing to write off the idea of categories just yet. Why not? Well, here’s a telling quote from Amazon:
“Finally, he shows how by “going miscellaneous,” anyone can reap rewards from the deluge of information in modern work and life.” (italics added by me)
The author posits that the power now lies in with the masses in that they decide how information is organized and they decide what information is important to them. However, I immediately thought of the deluge of information and the time necessary to find and parse all of it. While I enjoy exploring the internet, I readily admit this kind of activity takes a lot of time. Most of the time I don’t have the luxury to take all the raw data and organize it in a way that’s meaningful for me. I want information and I want it fast. I don’t have time to read 20 news articles and decide what’s most important. I like having The New York Times decide what’s the most important news story for me by putting it on the front page.
What are your thoughts on this book/theory?
One Comment, Comment or Ping
Hubert
On a nerdy discourse note… Having information ordered and fed by entities in some way benefit consumers in the higher class status, because they might be purchasing “wants” versus “needs”. For lower socio economic status consumers, the power to organize data may be a benefit to them, since spending time to research and purchase high quality times might lower their costs in the long run. That’s what’s nice about Buzzillions. In another way, we can look at this from an expert versus typical user perspective. Experts may not have the full use and experience of a product to judge it’s success and failures. My 2 pennies.
Jul 30th, 2008
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