Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital DisorderBy David Weinberger
Times Books, 2007. 277 pgs. Nonfiction
The internet has prompted a revolution in information science. This book is about the emerging methods of finding information. These methods are applied to locating music (iTunes), books (Amazon and WorldCat), real estate (Zillow and PropSmart), photographs (Flickr), encyclopedias of information (Wickipedia), used stuff of every sort (eBay), and the list goes on.
Weinberger sets for three orders of information. The first order is the arrangement of things (books alphabetical on a shelf, for example), the second order involved a representation such as cards in a card catalog. With the first two orders things were like leaves on a tree and to get to any given leaf one had to follow the correct path of branches and twigs to get to it. The third order is digital. Now we forget about the branches and just rake the leaves into the piles we’re interested in.
Very accessible with plenty of examples (that will have you pulling up websites on your computer), this book includes a little library science, a few facts from history, a bit about biology, while being essentially a work of philosophy.
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