Why everything is miscellaneous

"The solution to the information-overload problem," says David Weinberger, confidently, "is more information."

Weinberger, who completed his PhD in philosophy at the University of Toronto, is the author of a new book, Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. When he says miscellaneous and disorder, however, he doesn't mean it in a bad way. Far from it.

Information nowadays is increasingly coming to us in digital form, and thus by its very nature is expansive, nearly inexhaustible, and disordered. But also by virtue of its nature, it is bendable to our every desire.

The nature of information, argues Weinberger from San Francisco, where he's in the middle of a book tour, is that it's all miscellaneous.

Miscellaneous means that nothing fits together. What do you mean by it?

What I'm suggesting is that, digitally, it turns out that it's often better to treat everything as the miscellaneous drawer without worrying about how you're going to classify it. Rather than having to decide ahead of time what the right way of organizing it is, we can leave that to the person who comes to it with a particular interest and give her the tools to sort through it. I'm not recommending we go miscellaneous, it's already happened.

So we should embrace the miscellaneous? That, as you write, "the messiness of miscellaneous information doesn't reduce its utility."

The digital order is not a particular order. It allows multiple ways of organizing. So the first thing that happens when you have a huge miscellaneous field is you have to make sense of it. You don't want to leave it miscellaneous, because that's just chaos. It's rich in potential to be made sense of. That's what's so important about it, and we've been inventing ways of sorting through it.

Sorting. There's a disaster waiting to happen. I checked my home computer photo archive and there are over 1,200 pictures, all with anonymous labels: DSC9205.jpg, etc. I don't have the energy to go through them.

It takes time, judgment. That's why you haven't gone through it. The problem with photos on your desktop is that there isn't enough metadata there and it's hard to create it. As you accumulate more and more, without labels of various sorts, adding a new good picture will be the same thing as throwing it away. In order for miscellaneous to have value, (you need) the information about each item.

This is what you mean by information overload being solved by more information?

Without any additional information, we're in that situation where information fear mongers were peddling information overload, that you can't find anything. But the Web is so much bigger than anything we anticipated, yet we generally find what we need.

This is one reason why Flickr is such a good example. The tagging that's so essential because it adds human meaning can be done by anyone who views it. So this is one of the possible ways of solving the problem of not enough information... your family, not just you, ought to be tagging them. (In the future, you could have) other things like aperture use, flash use, or even latitude and longitude. When it's connected to your calendar, the system can say, "This picture you took in Mexico on your sister's birthday."

Once the information about the information is in place, how it's used is limitless. So what's the big deal?

It helps free up the understanding so we can explore the relationships that are actually there. We get an indefinite number of ways of organizing, each of which reflects individual interests and ways of thinking about the world. Also, traditionally as we've looked for the single right way of organizing things, it puts power in the hands of those who control the means of categorization. Inevitably, the organization schemes reflect personal and cultural biases.

What's wrong with Dewey Decimal, the system we all learned to use to look up books in libraries, which is still extensively used around the world?

As a practical way of shelving books, obviously it works. As a way of representing knowledge, which became one of Dewey's aims, enabling us physically to see what's around the book we're looking for, it suffers from the fact that it's a single way of categorizing and thus necessarily betrays the outlook of its creators.

In the case of Dewey, he was a 21-year-old, it was 1876, he was just finishing his college education at a small orthodox Christian college, and the system he created reflects that: Jews get their own number, Christians get about 90 numbers, Muslims get one they share with other religions, and the Buddhists are to the right of the decimal point! So the point is not that the Dewey system is laughably out of date, because in many ways it is. The point is, no matter how you fixed it, it still wouldn't be right for everyone.

If all information is miscellaneous, and anyone can do anything they want with it, without controls, won't there be chaos?

I don't want to scant the danger of leaving control of information in the hands of a few people, however well-intentioned. It means that in North American newspapers, there's very little about Africa. And in some of them there's way more about Paris Hilton than about entire continents. That's the danger there.

You seem to think this newest information age will have profound effects on education. For instance, you say that memorizing facts is now a skill "more relevant to quiz shows than to life."

Why would you (memorize)? Writing externalizes memory, so we don't have to memorize everything because we can write it down and look it up. We're doing that on a huge scale with a whole new range of facts. So why bother remembering if you have reliable access to the information externally? That's a good thing, because it enables us to do things that are more useful, like trying to make sense of things.

That's not to say we can externalize all facts, we never have to learn anything. If you're a chemist, it's not good enough to say, "I could always look up if helium is a gas." You should just know that, because that will help you advance your thought. It's just that there's a broad range of facts (that) there's no longer any reason for us to remember.

You also predict that when our kids become teachers, they're not going to be administering tests in the same way they take them today.

Students now do their homework on the computer at home, and very likely they're doing it online, which means they're doing it with their friends, they have (instant messaging) open, or text messaging, and they're talking about boys and girls and sports and the homework, like, "I don't know why she's talking about economics in the Civil War."

They're doing it socially, which is in my view almost exactly what it should be, because we learn together in conversation. That's how they're going to be learning the rest of their lives. They're going to be doing it online, looking stuff up and if they don't find it, posting to a discussion board. But they're being graded as if they're doing it individually and tested with their heads down in a quiet room. It's not testing what it means to learn anymore.

So no tests? Different tests? Kids will rejoice!

I don't know, I'm not an educator. Insofar as we still need to test, we should ask why we're testing.

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