Everything Is Miscellaneous

Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder
by David Weinberger

In the past, physical limitations led to classifications systems in which everything was forced into a single category. A library patron needed to know which shelf contained a particular book, so each book was assigned a category within the Dewey Decimal system. In the digital world, it is more useful for things to have multiple classifications.

“Reality is multifaceted. There are lots of ways to slice it. How we choose to slice it up depends on why we’re slicing it up.”

The key is metadata, or information about information. (Using a photo as an example, the date, location, camera model, photographer’s name, and tags about the content are examples of metadata.) “In the miscellaneous order, the only distinction between metadata and data is that metadata is what you already know and data is what you’re trying to find out… Keeping products miscellaneous allows customers to search for them more efficiently. Allowing customers to tag items lets the products be in multiple categories at once.”

Weinberger argues that traditional organization charts are dysfunctional classification systems.  Companies should  encourage “conversations across the formal lines of authority… The messiness of a diagram of social interaction is often a measure of the level of innovation in a company…  Every line that’s drawn ought to be systematically smudged.”

The author writes about the discussion page attached to each Wikipedia article, where contributors resolve conflicting entries. “Wikipedia is to a large degree the product of a community, not just of disconnected individuals.”  He also advocates the use of corporate wiki sites. “Businesses want their employees to be as smart and well informed as possible, but most are structured to reward individuals for being smarter and better informed than others… Not only does this diminish the incentive for collaboration, it misses the opportunity to provide the expanded context that Wikipedia’s discussion pages make available…  Wikis reduced emails about projects by 75 percent and halved meeting times… The knowledge exists in the connections and in the gaps; it requires active engagement.”

Weinberger also talks about the Semantic Web.  He briefly explains the organizational structure: Resource Description Framework (RDF) and ontologies. He concludes, “Unfortunately, such projects re-create the same problems faced by the traditional categorizations of knowledge: Human topics are too big and squishy to fit well into any one set of boxes.”

Note: The publisher classified this book in the Business category. I feel compelled to put it in the General category. 🙂

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Weinberger, David. Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2007. Buy from Amazon.com

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