Everything is Miscellaneous: Difference between revisions
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'''Book: Everything is Miscellaneous. David Weinberger.''' | |||
Book: Everything is Miscellaneous. David Weinberger. | |||
URL = http://worldcat.org/oclc/122291427 | URL = http://worldcat.org/oclc/122291427 | ||
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But at the risk of seeming like a nostalgic prig, I wonder if anyone else out there is also fiending for the quaint numeric certainty of Dewey and his decimals. We know what we’re gaining when a photograph is tagged “beach,” “Phuket,” “galangal,” “Christmas,” and “singhabeer.” There’s a whole lot of potentially useful information in those tags, for one thing, and you can simultaneously file it under as many categories as you want. But is anything lost when it’s not called “P & P in Phuket, Christmas 2008?” When a photo has multiple names and infinite existences, and doesn’t let us pretend that, in this very 21st-century world, we can still exert 18th-century control?" | But at the risk of seeming like a nostalgic prig, I wonder if anyone else out there is also fiending for the quaint numeric certainty of Dewey and his decimals. We know what we’re gaining when a photograph is tagged “beach,” “Phuket,” “galangal,” “Christmas,” and “singhabeer.” There’s a whole lot of potentially useful information in those tags, for one thing, and you can simultaneously file it under as many categories as you want. But is anything lost when it’s not called “P & P in Phuket, Christmas 2008?” When a photo has multiple names and infinite existences, and doesn’t let us pretend that, in this very 21st-century world, we can still exert 18th-century control?" | ||
(http://www.radioopensource.org/weinbergers-miscellany/) | (http://www.radioopensource.org/weinbergers-miscellany/) | ||
=Reviews= | |||
#Cory Doctorow (BoingBoing) at http://www.boingboing.net/2007/05/02/everything_is_miscel.html | |||
#Karen Schneider at http://www.techsource.ala.org/blog/2007/05/weinbergers-well-ordered-miscellany.html | |||
#Ethan Zuckerman at http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/?p=1413 | |||
#Peter Morville at http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000167.php | |||
Revision as of 03:22, 6 May 2007
Book: Everything is Miscellaneous. David Weinberger.
URL = http://worldcat.org/oclc/122291427
Description
"It’s hard to summarize his theory of everything in one sentence, but this is pretty close: “To get as good at browsing as we are at finding — and to take full advantage of the digital opportunity — we have to get rid of the idea that there’s a best way of organizing the world.”
Weinberger is the first to admit this is a mighty tall order. We were organizing the world (and, implicitly, privileging our particular organizing principles) long before Linnaeus and Dewey. As Weinberger explains, we’re basically hard-wired to organize all the atoms and planets we see: “We invest so much time in making sure our world isn’t miscellaneous in part because disorder is inefficient — ‘Anybody see the gas bill?’ — but also because it feels bad.” And Weinberger isn’t suggesting that we’re going to stop naming, sorting, or ordering things. In fact as “things” gallop exponentially into our lives we’ll end up doing it more. The trick is that we — not librarians, or book sellers, or photo editors, or other metadata misers — will be doing the sorting.
We at Open Source use — and celebrate — the new tagging tools on a daily basis. We’d have no photos on our site without Flickr and no way to easily share links without del.icio.us. We gaze at the Global Voices tag cloud and dream of the day when we’ll have one of our own.
But at the risk of seeming like a nostalgic prig, I wonder if anyone else out there is also fiending for the quaint numeric certainty of Dewey and his decimals. We know what we’re gaining when a photograph is tagged “beach,” “Phuket,” “galangal,” “Christmas,” and “singhabeer.” There’s a whole lot of potentially useful information in those tags, for one thing, and you can simultaneously file it under as many categories as you want. But is anything lost when it’s not called “P & P in Phuket, Christmas 2008?” When a photo has multiple names and infinite existences, and doesn’t let us pretend that, in this very 21st-century world, we can still exert 18th-century control?" (http://www.radioopensource.org/weinbergers-miscellany/)
Reviews
- Cory Doctorow (BoingBoing) at http://www.boingboing.net/2007/05/02/everything_is_miscel.html
- Karen Schneider at http://www.techsource.ala.org/blog/2007/05/weinbergers-well-ordered-miscellany.html
- Ethan Zuckerman at http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/?p=1413
- Peter Morville at http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000167.php
More Information
Podcast at http://www.radioopensource.org/weinbergers-miscellany/