Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger
Times Books, $25.00, 278pp, hc. Nonfiction. ISBN: 9780805080438.
This book is shelved in the business section, but it strikes me more as an interesting thought project that should appeal to science fiction fans (who are always on the cutting edge of technology). Weinberger’s main discussion is how we keep, use, and accumulate information. Before the rise of the computer, information was tied irrevocably to the physical world, meaning that everything had to be in some specific place. Thus, we could arrange the ideas in a book in some order, but once the book was printed, the order was set, so that Idea D would always follow Idea C. And then, to further solidify the experience, the book itself had to be placed in some specific location. As the amount of information around us grew, humans learned to classify and sort information (card catalogs in libraries, which tell you a little bit about the book and precisely where it is). So in order to find anything, it had to be classified as precisely as possible, and kept in that one specific place, which was great for order, but not so good for finding serendipitous connections.
Now that we have computers, however, the book no longer has to sit only on the shelf between Voume B and Volume E. As an electronic book, we really don’t care where it is, so long as there are sufficient tags to point us at it. And further, now that it’s electronic, it really doesn’t matter that Idea D is directly after Idea C, as long as each idea has its own tags to get us there when we want it.
The miscellaneous used to be the enemy of the orderly. You could sort all your stuff into discreet categories, but the “miscellaneous” pile was much less help. Now, however, in the electronic world, with proper tags, everything can be thrown into the miscellaneous pile, and interesting connections will come from the meta-data: the information about the information in that pile (for example, which pieces are most popular; which share similar tags; and so on).
To make SFScope an example, when I was editing pretty much the same information as Science Fiction Chronicle, I had a specific monthly deadline, and any news which came after it (even if only the next day) had to wait a full month to be revealed; this also meant that all the news I got within that one-month span of time appeared together in one issue of the magazine, making it appear more related than anything that came the previous or next month. And in that print magazine, I had to categorize each item into its one and only proper section of the magazine. Publishing the same data in SFScope, the artificial grouping of “issue” completely disappeared: now news is published when I get it. And I no longer have to categorize each item into only one category (so the story on my appearance on Hour of the Wolf can go in both “Performances & Podcasts” (a radio show is a performance) and “Activities” (something this one specific person is doing). As long as the story is properly tagged (with my name, the show’s name, host Jim Freund’s name, the fact that it’s a radio show, and so on), it is just as easily found by someone looking for it. And in this digital world, other things seemingly completely unrelated, but with similar tags, may also appear on a search, leading the reader into some new and unexpected avenue of learning.
I’m not doing the book justice, though I did enjoy it. It opened my mind to even more possibilities that I may try to implement in the future. My only qualm with it was that Weinberger seemed to be trying to justify an entire book. After discussing the joy of the miscellaneous, and our ways of categorizing and knowing, he had more space to fill, and went into discussions of what we know, and what the gaps in our knowledge tell us, and many other things that are mildly interesting.
Anyway, I’d recommend this book. If nothing else, he pointed me at several features of and sites on the internet I hadn’t previously encountered.