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Miscellaneous is powerful: The new order of order

In the world of the miscellaneous, information isn't the important stuff; it's what happens between those bits and pieces that counts, according to David Weinberger. In "Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder," Weinberger argues that it is the connections we build around information that create value and meaning in our world.

2007-08-01

"People keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't. Everything is deeply intertwingled." — Ted Nelson American sociologist, philosopher and pioneer of information technology   In the world of the miscellaneous, information isn't the important stuff; it's what happens between those bits and pieces that counts, according to David Weinberger. In other words, the connections we build around information are what create value and meaning in our world. To Carolus Linnaeus, the 18^th-century botanist who came up with the binomial system for naming plants, "Everything is Miscellaneous" would seem a threatening, if not downright blasphemous, statement. But today's biologists, who depend on a complex, ever-changing digital matrix of research in their work, are fully on board with the spirit of Weinberger's book (subtitled "The Power of the New Digital Disorder"). The new order of order Many of us have had experience using iTunes, Amazon and Wikipedia — examples of what Weinberger terms "the third order" of information classification. This new digital order demonstrates the power of the miscellaneous. The first order of order is the sorting of things themselves — books are collected into libraries, artworks into museums, chairs into furniture stores. But as these collections grow, so does the need to track or find specific items. The family photographer organizes his work into photo albums. Library books are classified into card catalogs. Inventory logs keep records of items bought and sold in stores. This is the second order of order. However, as Weinberger notes, there are limitations to even the most successful and popular second-order systems. He uses the Dewey Decimal Classification system as an example. Despite the many revisions and updates since its development by Melvil Dewey in 1876, it hasn't quite managed to grapple with the obstacle of newly emerging subjects. And photo albums must use a single method of organization, whether chronological or some other personally selected criteria. With the dawning of the digital age comes the third order of order — one that changes the basic rules of order. Take the photo collector, for example. Once the digital photos are dumped into the PC or Mac, they can be tagged and labeled in any arrangement, and retrieved in any number of ways. They can be uploaded to Flickr or a Web site, e-mailed to a relative, Photoshopped and archived on a "funny photos" site, and printed for inclusion in a photo album. "The digital world thereby allows us to transcend the most fundamental rule of ordering the real world," Weinberger writes. "Instead of everything having its place, it's better if things can get assigned multiple places simultaneously." Once upon a time, the task of human intellectuals was to organize and classify knowledge. The task of searching for information became easier and more accessible but these systems had their limits. An encyclopedia is handy, but the scholar who needs in-depth knowledge of a particular subject won't be satisfied with a 250-word entry. Thanks to the third order of order, that scholar can mine the Internet to find the information he or she needs as well as hyperlinks leading to related blog entries, videos, podcasts, archival material and more. Social implications of the third order The implications of this third order of order are profound for education, business and social interactions of all kinds. One of the most controversial examples of the third order can be found in blogs and wikis. The most famous of the latter is Wikipedia, the open-source online encyclopedia. Weinberger devotes a lot of space to Wikipedia, noting that despite its shortcomings, despite the chaos of thousands of contributors, and despite the fact that contributors remain anonymous, it somehow manages to work pretty well. In fact, the chaos of the Internet, with its bottom-up hierarchy, has brought forth numerous and innovative tools based on the apparent chaos and miscellany of information contained in the digital world. Weinberger points to the explosion of businesses whose success emerges from creating order from the vast depth of free information and creating value-added services. Google, Amazon, iTunes, Flickr, and Netflix are all successful businesses but there are thousands of others, less notable, that enable medical researchers, home buyers, travelers, historians and others to pluck a specific set of data from the miscellaneous information floating about in cyberspace, and utilize it to their own purposes. Weinberger believes that as individuals continue to generate, communicate, manipulate, aggregate, rearrange and transform the miscellaneous pieces of information in the digital world, it becomes more apparent that the growth of knowledge is not about holding on to information. Instead, only by letting it go and sharing it most widely can we observe how human beings continue to explore it, discuss it, expand upon it, extract new meanings and create new ideas. "In the world after the Enlightenment, the cultural task was to build knowledge," Weinberger writes. "In the miscellaneous world, the task is to build meaning."     Bottom Line:  

• In the first order of order, we organize things themselves (i.e. books in a library). In the second order of order, we organize information about things (the card catalog). In the third order, both content and metadata are in the form of bits (digital information).
• The third order presents pieces of information like fallen leaves which we can arrange in any way imaginable. It enables us to bring any set of content next to any other, whether through relationships intended by the authors, crafted by readers, promoted by companies or created by customers.
• Miscellanized information is information without borders. The miscellanizing of information, knowledge and ideas rips these assets out of the hands of individual businesses and sets them free and, among other benefits, provides an opportunity for new information-based businesses to emerge.
• The miscellanizing of information is giving rise to a new category of business that enhances the value of information developed elsewhere and thus benefits the original creators of that information. Think of it as meta-business.
• The "meta move" presses upon every business that has information for users. While "going meta" does understandably scare many traditional industries, it's often a generosity that pays itself back not only by introducing a product to new users but by making it an integral part of their daily lives.

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