Book 31: Everything Is Miscellaneous

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

I read this book on the advice of the University of Michigan's School of Information, and I'm very glad that I had a chance to engage with its ideas. In Everything Is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger charts the growing anarchy spawned by the wealth of information available on the internet and the exploding number of ways we are finding to classify, personalize, and share this information. Though Weinberger is a bit too happy to use his buzzwords ("miscellaneous" and "third order" especially) every other sentence, the book raises several interesting points about the effect digitization and the freedom of the web is affecting the way we access and use knowledge. His thesis is concise and easily understood, well-developed and illustrated throughout the book. Weinberger's prose is easily readable and he alternates well between brief historical sketches and their modern counterparts; for example, he writes of Linnaeus's classification of the animal kingdom and then examines how websites are innovating new ways to classify organisms, as well as examining how these systems affect our way of thinking about the world. Sometimes Weinberger makes a more obvious and lucid connection than others, but by and large he chooses relevant and interesting examples to illustrate the history and future of the classification and use of data. His chapters become a bit formulaic as each reads as a kind of mini-essay, but the book connects its ideas throughout chapters and does present a unifying view of how the digital revolution is re-shaping society. His detailed attention to websites occasionally ventures into the blandly promotional and sometimes redundant, but again his examples are chosen well and used to illustrate his point, if with some excessive cheerleading at times. Everything Is Miscellaneous takes an interesting and readable look at the ways in which technology, whether by collaborative social technologies like tagging or through expanded and flexible databases, is fundamentally re-shaping our relationship with information and knowledge in the digital age.

Grade: B+