I recently had the odd pleasure of sitting down at dinner with David Weinberger and a few others to chat about his newest book Everything Is Miscellaneous:. We chatted about a few things and he even signed my book, saying:
“Peter, My nemesis! See you in hell, you bastard! – David Wienberrrrr”
This was pretty goddamn fantastic actually because normally I go into these types of things kind of nervous. Be that as it may, he seemed to disagree with almost everything I said and we ended the night as mortal enemies!
His book, though, is fantastic. Really very interesting and I highly recommend you buy a copy. It’s all about how humanity’s old, physical, object sorting technologies are nearly completely irrelevant now but that some of the ways we think are still catching up.
By way of an example let’s consider books. It used to be the predominant consideration when organizing books was that you could only have so many copies and each one took up space. This lead to some very odd considerations such as those pointed out so long ago by Clay Shirky:
My favorite – this is the Dewey Decimal System’s categorization for religions of the world, which is the 200 category.
Dewey, 200: Religion
210 Natural theology
220 Bible
230 Christian theology
240 Christian moral & devotional theology
250 Christian orders & local church
260 Christian social theology
270 Christian church history
280 Christian sects & denominations
290 Other religions
How much is this not the categorization you want in the 21st century?
Note that there are 7 top-level categories for Christianity and and the rest? Of course they fall under a single category called “Other Religions.”
This is actually pretty much the way most libraries including the library of congress are organized today. Still! The reason is because it’s such a hassle to run out and change it all, because every single book has to be physically moved and modified by rewriting the little white numbers on the spine.
Today, of course, you can search on Amazon for books in dozens of different ways. They even index the entire contents of many of the books they sell, thus making the book itself part of its own meta-data. Tagging systems allow for the entire categorization scheme to evolve rapidly. There is no cost to re-organizing things. It can even be done on the fly!
When you search for something on Amazon, you get all those pages which are customized just for you, just for your search. No other person will ever see exactly the same thing. Image if you visited the library and the whole thing was reorganized instantly based on your current needs.
