Is miscellaneousness a virtue?
I really liked Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger's new book on knowledge, classification and "the power of the new digital disorder" (here's the website). I'm going to kvetch about one thing I didn't like, but overall I thought it was great book.
Books like EiM are sometimes of the "this changes everything!" variety (cf. Wikinomics). People love their paradigm shifts. But David approaches the topic with what I would call Socratic humility (as befits a philosopher). I don't see that very often, and it's worth calling out.
So what didn't I like? Basically, I found myself stumbling over the "miscellaneous" metaphor. Over and over again.
The conceptual foundation of the book is David's three orders of knowledge [1]:
- In the first order, we organize things themselves (like books on a shelf) which can only be in one place at once.
- In the second order, we create surrogate records like card catalogs and capture metadata about the things we're organizing. We can begin to provide multiple paths to these things, but only in a limited way. Because we're still working with things, like cards, we're limited by the constraints of the physical world. The size of a card, for example, limits the amount of metadata we can capture about a book. The size of our library limits the number of cards we can have. These physical constraints introduce economic limits: you need to have money and space to store your books, cabinets for your catalogs, and so on. So second-order organization tends to be authoritarian and top-down (where there's just one way of organizing things, like the Dewey Decimal Classification System).
- In the third order, we're working with bits which effectively removes the physical constaints of the second order. We can have as much metadata as we can store. We can have multiple ways of organizing things. We also have the Web, which removes the economic constraints of the second order. Now anyone can create, share, annotate and organize information.
I agree with all of this, and I think it's a good model for thinking about the changes we're experiencing.
But throughout the book David uses words like "mess" and "miscellaneous" to describe the third-order. He says things like: "Third order messes reverse entropy, becoming more meaningful as they become messier, with more relationships built in." In one section he compares it to dumping silverware into the drawer without sorting it. The implication is that the third-order is literally chaotic and disordered.
The reality, though, is quite different. In the first and second orders, we're dealing with human-scale organization systems. In the third-order, the organization systems are abstract, more complicated and harder to imagine. (For example: Draw a map of Wikipedia. Or: Visualize a 10-dimension faceted classification system. You can't... so you might say something like "that's really messy.")
But looking messy and being messy are different things. The systems David describes are highly organized, but they have a complexity that defies easy explanation. (Every so often the word "complexity" comes up, but David sticks pretty doggedly to the "messy" and "miscellaneous" metaphors. Which is kind of like taking a first-order perspective on a third-order problem).
Think about it: Not only is there more information than ever before, information is more organized than ever before. Some CEO or pundit is going to read this book and think that third-order "messy" is really just first-order messy but on computers. But it's because third-order information is basically well organized (though perhaps in a messy-complex way) that we are experiencing the revolution David discusses in the book.
(I think there's a point to be made as well that information and organization systems go hand-in-hand. In Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond observes that the earliest writings were accounts of stored food, livestock and tributes--second-order metadata in David's terms.)
EiM is much more than a meditation on messiness, so don't take my semantic quibbles too seriously. (But take them somewhat seriously, especially if you're not familiar with messy-complicated information.) It's definitely worth reading for its extended consideration of how technology is exposing the contingent, social and fuzzy nature of knowledge. And David convincingly argues that this is a fundamental shift in not just what we know, but how we know.
1. Rough-hewn, written from memory.
