Everything is Miscellaneous

 
Cluetrain Manifesto coauthor David Weinberger has just released a new book and it's a good one. Titled Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, Weinberger looks closely at how computers and the internet have have fundamentally altered how we organize and use information. Traditionally, because information was bound by atoms (usually paper), everything must go someplace but it can only go one place. But now through things such as tagging, contextual search, and social networks, we can, as he says, hang leaves on more that one branch (eg. Amazon's listing of books in multiple categories) and thus miscellany becomes an asset, not an incomprehensible mess. That's the core of the book; how life changes as humans have graduated from first- and second-order orders of knowledge to the digital third-order order. All interesting, but perhaps the part of this most relevant to the generalist discussion is how the third-order diminishes experts' exclusivity over defining relevant knowledge. "The new best strategy is to include everything. It costs more to delete things. Deletion traditionally was done by experts." Understanding breadth and interconnectedness ("intertwingularity," as he refers to it) grows in importance. As Weinberger says in the book's conclusion:

In the world after the Enlightenment, the cultural task was to build knowledge. In the miscellaneous world, the task is to build meaning, even though we can't yet know what we'll do with this new domain. Certainly some will mine it for knowledge that will change our lives through science and business. But knowledge will be only one product. Knowledge's new place will be in an ever-present mesh of social meaning. Knowledge is thus not being dethroned. We are way too good at knowing, and our continued progress - and survival - depends on it. But knowledge is now not our only project or single highest calling. Making sense of what we know is the broader task, a task for understanding within the infrastructure of meaning. (p.222)

Here below are a selection of excerpts from the text. Also worth checking out is this video of Weinberger presenting his ideas to folks at Google. The website for the book is here.

But discovering what you want is at least as important as finding what you know you want. Our bookstores look like they prefer seekers over browsers because the usual layout works well for people trying to find what they came in for, whereas there are almost as many ways to organize for browsers as there are browsers. (p.9)

We have entire industries and institutions built on the fact that the paper order severely limits how things can be organized. Museums, educational curricula, newspapers, the travel industry, and television schedules are all based on the assumption that in the second-order world, we need experts to go through information, ideas, and knowledge and put them neatly away. (p.22)

"A lumper takes things that seem disaparate and combines them because they have something similar. A splitter tends to take two things that are lumped together and separate them into smaller categories." Indexers tend to be one or the other, their technique driven by their personality. (p.71) ... Lumping and splitting physical objects requires us to make binary decisions about where things go. Ideas, information, and knowledge shouldn't have to suffer that limitation. (p.83)

A map makes the most sense when you can see it all at once. (p.77)

Pepsico says that about an eighth of the company's revenue growth in 2004 came from new products "inspired by diversity efforts." Putting unlike things together also works for Oscar-winning film editor Walter Murch. When he was editing Jarhead, he filled the walls of his studio with jumbled photos of five thousand separate shots in the movie. "It makes images collide with each other in very opportune ways," he said. (p.86)

Classification is a power struggle - it is political - because the first two orders require that there be a winner. (p.91)

...The miscellaneous doesn't much resemble our traditional view of knowledge. Knowledge, we've thought, has four characteristics, two of them modeled on properties of reality and two on properties of political regimes.
1. There is one reality and the real world is not self-contradictory.
2. If something is not clear to us we haven't understood it. (eg. "Which tastes better, beets or radishes?")
3. Experts are needed to keep bad info away from us and provide us with the best info.
4. Project funding is often granted by people who know less than the experts. (p.101)

Experts can be helpful, but in the age of miscellaneous they and their institutions are no longer in charge of our ideas. (p.102)

In the third order, where there is an abundance or resources, filtering on the way in decreases the value of that abundance by ruling out items that might be of great value to a few people. (p.103)

Thinking that 18-to-24-year-old suburban males exist as a market - as something more than a random slice - gets in the way of seeing the truly fascinating phenomenon: miscellaneous customers finding one another in the digital world and forming real social groups, not because they share essential demographic traits but because they're talking with one another. The markets that conversations make are real markets, not mere statistical clusterings. (p.118)

"People keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable, and sequential when they can't. Everything is deeply intertwingled." So said Ted Nelson, the eccentric visionary who coined the term hypertext in the mid-1960s. In the third order of order, information not only becomes intertwingled, intertwingularity enables knowledge. And unique identifiers enable intertwingularity - although there can be so many unique identifiers for the same thing and at various levels of abstraction that the identifiers are all a-twingle also. (p.125)

This binding is certainly different from the way broadcast media formed one nation, under Walter Cronkite. With everyone seeing the same national news and reading the same handful of local newspapers, there was a shared experience that we could count on. Now, as our social networks create third-order front pages unique to our group's interests, we at least get past the oft-heard objection that what Nicholas Negroponte called The Daily Me fragments our culture into isolated individuals. In fact, we are more likely to be reading The Daily Me, My Friends, and Some Folks I Respect. We're not atomized. We're molecularizing, forming groups that create a local culture. What's happening falls between the expertise of the men in th editorial boardroom and the "wisdom of crowds." It is the wisdom of groups, employing social expertise, by which the connections among people help guide what the group learns and knows. (p.131)

Regarding, in particular, critics of Wikipedia: If these experts of the second order sound a bit hysterical, it is understandable. The change they're facing from the miscellaneous is deep and real. Authorities have long filtered and organized information for us, protecting us from what isn't worth our time and helping us find what we need to give our beliefs a sturdy foundation. But with the miscellaneous, it;s all available to us, unfiltered. (p.133)

Messiness has always been with us, of course. But our culture has not only struggled against it, it has measured its progress by how thoroughly it has tamed it. Everything has its place, we've been taught, and we master our world - we know it - by discerning and enforcing those places. (p.177)

If there are too many dotted lines on a traditional organization chart, it's taken as a sign that the chart needs to be redrawn or the management team needs to be replaced. Dotted lines traditionally are a sign of failure. That's changing. (p.180) ... So why do we have so much white space in the standard org chart? "Part of it is that we abhor complexity," replies [Valdis] Krebs [a social cartographer]. "We try to keep our lives a simple as possible. We think if we logically organize things, then everything will slot into those holes, and we'll be able to face any situation. That was maybe true in the 1800s, but now we're surprised all the time." (p.181)

Thinking that people's skills are defined by the department they're in wastes their talent. (p.189)

"Network analysts have found that innovation happens at intersections," he says. "Ron Burt of the University of Chicago studied Raytheon and found that people positioned correctly in a network couldn't help but get more ideas than someone who wasn't positioned there." "Positioned correctly" means being at the intersection of ideas. "If you're in a busy intersection in a city, you're more likely to get splashed with water," Krebs explains. (p.182)

In the sort-of, kind-of world in which a leaf can hang from many branches, our task becomes less to discover the one thing that something is than to see what it sort-of, kind-of, 73 percent is. The task of knowing is no longer to see the simple. It is to swim the complex. (p.198)

Meta business is inevitable because it adds value to information, and for that there will always and ever be a demand. (p.227)

By discussing differences while standing on shared ground, we work towards understanding. (p.203)