Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger (2007)

Review by Donald Clark

Where do you put a book like this in a library or bookshop? Weinberger, also co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, asks precisely these questions showing that traditional ways of seeing knowledge, like the Dewey Decimal System or physical classifications in bookshops, are constrained by the real world of atoms. It’s different in the digital world.

Physicality of paper

There is no single natural way of ordering the world. The old Aristotelian view has dissolved under the onslaught of a massive online experiment where unimaginable amounts of knowledge have been stored and retrieved, digitally on a global scale. Library models simply cracked under the pressure. The digital world is NOT paper. It frees us from the physicality and linearity of paper.

New shape of knowledge

We’ve gotten good at organising PHYSICAL objects, but there’s always stuff which doesn’t fit that has to be called miscellaneous, like the drawer in your kitchen that doesn’t have forks, knives and spoons. There is no ONE right way of ordering the world. In the physical world you cannot have two things in the same place. The real world has severe limitations and someone has to decide what goes on the front page of the newspaper. Miscellany is breaking the old classifications down and allowing users to rearrange and find things on the fly.

To understand the internet we must understand the new ways in which knowledge is being stored and retrieved. This is a deep issue that underlies the whole of education and training. Personalisation is massively amplified online as it frees us from the tyranny of time and location. In the virtual world things can, be instantly rearranged to suit the individual.

Whether it’s alphabetical, chronological, categories, geography or hierarchy; classificatory techniques are always skews on reality. Classification needs to be multi-faceted. Most classifications from the Periodic Table to printed Encylopedias have to pick one classification over another. Dewey, Linneas and Adler all wanted ideal classifications of knowledge, but that proved too utopian. In the virtual world this problem vanishes. Knowledge has no fixed shape in the virtual world. There’s just endless opportunities to present knowledge in the way that suits our pluralistic purposes.

Dewey

His account of the Dewey Decimal System is a great case study. Almost all US libraries use the system but it’s hopelessly inadequate and out-of-date. Its categories are that of a 19th century small Christian college, not the wider world. His infatuation with decimals also put the system at a disadvantage as it imposes an artificial hierarchy. It’s a victim of its own time and place and is weirdly out of date. In fact, all such systems are doomed to failure as knowledge is massively diverse and shifts across time with cultural changes.

Amazon, with its customer reviews, customer lists and statistical analysis of customer buying patterns and collaborative filtering is a million miles away from Dewey, and its friendly disorder is what people buying books really want. Amazon ditches Dewey as it organises books for EACH individual buyer, puts books in front of you, not within a defined category but in reaction to your potential likes and dislikes.

Making music miscellaneous

It’s often thought that real shopping preserves ‘discovery’. Sure we are natural browsers but as iTunes and Amazon show, discovery is becoming more powerful online. In music the natural unit has been shown to be the track and personal playlists are seen to be more powerful than CDs. We browse but physical browsing of atoms is far less efficient than browsing bits. Yet even digital archiving is losing the battle as third order classifications win out over fixed metadata schemas.

First order – books
Second order – card catalogues
Third order – digital

Sure, the book goes on too long on some case studies, and many of his points are obvious and could have done with less elaboration. But I can forgive him for this, as this is an important topic that can bear a little elaboration and repetition.

What he doesn’t do is examine the nature of knowledge itself. I would have liked to have seen more on Quine, Wittgenstein and the 2000 years of philosophical reflection on the issue of ‘What is knowledge?’ It’s too shallow on the deeper issues surrounding the definition of knowledge. But maybe that’s for another book.