David Weinberger: Everything is miscellaneous
By Infonomia

David Weinberger, a trained philosopher, currently fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and co-authors of the famous and influential Cluetrain Manifesto – The End of Business as Usual (C. Locke, R. Levine, D. Searls, D.Weinberger, 1999) has published Everything is Miscellaneous – The Power of the New Digital Disorder. A book that covers the breakdown of the established order of ordering by explaining how methods of categorization designed for physical objects fail when we can instead put things in multiple categories at once, and search them in many ways.

“The world is not as precise and noble as we would like. Over time, it became clearer to me that the solution for the information overload problem we have been warned about in the early nineties, was in fact to generate more information with more meta-data.”

If you structure and order your information so that it’s perfectly clear and everything in its place, you actually lose a huge amount of information. That costs your business in every way, including in terms of its ability to innovate because innovation generally happens at the messy intersection of ideas. A very simple example of this is an organisation’s chart: everyone is in one and only one box. There is only one type of relationship, every line means exactly the same thing: “reports to, is managed by”. That is useful but it’s too neat and if that’s all you had you would lose all the information that talks about the other sorts of tacit relationships. There is information in messiness and businesses need that information, by narrowing their vision they can be efficient but they won’t be very smart.

Take an online store: you are absolutely going to categorise before you go public and that’s fine. It’s not a matter of no-value in pre-categorising but it is negative to think that there is only one way to categorise your world of products. Instead enable multiple ways of categorizing and let the user do it for you! This will enable them to find what they want because they are thinking about the product their way. This will also allow them and you to pull together pieces that otherwise they would not have seen.

The process of creating new knowledge is inclusive: it includes bad ideas, bad research, good ideas, good research and it’s very important that we have techniques to distinguish so. In the case of arxiv.org (scientific pre-publication sites) it’s clear from the site itself that this has not been reviewed. And as long as you know that, when you go to it, it is useful. When you don’t know that you can make terrible mistakes. We want as much information as we can, we want it to be categorized in as many ways as possible so we can find it and pull it together and we want to be able to judge its quality but we don’t want “entirely random”.