Review: Everything Is Miscellaneous

A few comments on David Weinberger's "Everything is Miscellaneous."

• If you've followed the web very closely, most of this the book will be familiar. However, the author's discussion is still worth reading.


• If you haven't followed the web closely, this is a good (yet short) intro to a fundamental aspect of its structure.


• The author explores some of the activity around (and implications of) the emergence of what he calls "third order" structures for organizing/accessing information.
  


• "First order" is the physical world; there's a single order for everyone, and users have to adapt to it (e.g., the goods in a retail store). Order is determined sometime between store design & stocking the shelves.


• "Second order" is an index of the physical world (e.g., a card catalog). Order is determined by the type of index (e.g., alphabetical, Dewey Decimal, etc.).


• "Third order" is an index that is created for a specific context (e.g., Amazon's "people who bought this book also bought..."). Order is determined when the "index" is created, and changes over time.


• The book is very readable and will probably provoke some new ideas, even if the territory is familiar.


• The author's discussion of philosophy is occasionally distracting. Having read a bit about modernism, postmodernism, and the historical roots of both, I thought his description of modernism and postmodernism was a bit on the shallow side. As a result, I got the impression he was dismissive toward modernism, and overly enthusiastic about postmodernism. From an epistemological perspective, I just didn't see much awareness of a middle ground (e.g., critical realism). If I see something presented as a dichotomy that I've come to understand as more of a spectrum, I start wondering about the author's purpose in presenting it that way. Of course, it may be that the author oversimplified in an effort to hit a mainstream target.


• However, if you've not thought/read much about how we know what we know, this is a very readable summary of the fuzziness of human understanding. And, the research cited is much more supportive of the middle ground than the philosophical extremes.


• I wish he had covered how knowledge is turned into action. I suppose the minimal discussion of this topic is understandable, given that he's a philosopher, he's trying to hit one topic (how we've traditionally organized information & how the web is changing that), and he's trying to keep it short & simple.


• Finally, there's not much exploration of what this means for groups with a specific purpose (e.g., a work group, company, etc.). The exploding access to a "world of miscellany" is raising very interesting questions about how a group creates/maintains enough coherence to act sensibly in moving toward a goal.

Of course, whether something is miscellaneous depends on the context...the author's point is that all info/capabilities tend to be miscellaneous WHEN DECOUPLED FROM A CONTEXT.

No info/capabilities relevant to a specific context are miscellaneous for that context.