Comments on: One-A-Day: David Weinberger, Everything is Miscellaneous

By: back40

back40 — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 21:22:19 +0000

If Weinberg had claimed that data was miscellaneous who could quibble? But knowledge? Isn’t organization an inherent attribute of knowledge, almost a defining attribute? Information is organized data. Knowledge is understood information. Some would say.

BTW, you are right that this is a very old idea even if you only consider the data processing world.

By: William Benzon

William Benzon — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 14:03:16 +0000

“Multiply-connected along many dimensions” is very different from miscellaneous.

What happens when you query the web via Google is that the search engine imposes a virtual order on the whole web such that items most relevant to the query are at one end of the ordering and those least relevant are at the other end. The way it does this is rather crude, as are the queries one typically makes, but it couldn’t happen if there weren’t some order there. The problem is to make the process more effective.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 13:38:13 +0000

Yeah, that’s another issue: he takes informational objects (artifacts, books, natural objects, photographs, etc.) as if they don’t have any internal organization or structure themselves, as if they’re intrinsically “miscellaneous”.

By: William Benzon

William Benzon — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 13:17:47 +0000

Haven’t read the book, so I don’t quite know what’s going on, but there’s a lot of room between the notion that there’s one best natural way to organize knowledge and there’s no way at all. The fact that there’s no particularly good way to arrange my books on shelves so that like is near like doesn’t mean there’s no order to what’s in those books.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:35:15 +0000

Yeah. I mean, I thought it got old after Negroponte promised that digital stuff would clean your house, do your homework, take your vacations for you, and solve world hunger, but it’s still going strong.

By: Doug

Doug — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 22:31:52 +0000

” some of the digerati have with proclaiming the digital as a utopian revolution against an old order”

Goodness me, acquisition editors are still buying this as a rhetorical strategy? I can see it for the first couple of years after Mosaic went out into the world, but then something like reality set in…