David Weinberger, “Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder,“ Times Books, Henry Holt and Company May 2007 $25.00 288pps.

In the heady days of the late ‘90s Internet boom, the business aisles at bookstores overflowed with tales of accidental software billionaires and breathless pronouncements that the Internet was the greatest invention since fire. If you find yourself nostalgic for that era of irrational enthusiasm, take heart, because the old hype is being reshaped and reshipped as “Web 2.0.”

David Weinberger is perfectly situated to comment on what’s really new about this second generation of the Web.  A fellow at Harvard’s Beekman Center for the Internet and Society, co-author of “The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as We Know It,” a classic of Web 1.0 hype, and author of “Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web,” a book more thoughtful and less bombastic than its subtitle would lead you expect, Weinberger has experience in marketing, entrepreneurship, and even politics – he was the senior Internet advisor for Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign. Drawing from all of these perspectives, Weinberger describes how the Web is evolving into a truly social software. If Web 1.0’s characteristic activity was surfing static web pages, Web 2.0 is a more participatory experience, in which users upload content and actively shape their environment. Blogs are the best known are evidence of this shift, but Weinberger is particularly interested in the explosion of sites like Flikr, for sharing photos, YouTube, for posting videos, and del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site where users categorize, collect and share their Web discoveries.

Weinberger sees this kind of user-directed labeling, or “tagging,” as key to the latest transformations of the knowledge economy. Tags are metadata, which is information about information. To illustrate the importance of tagging, Weinberger compares the way people organize old-fashioned photo albums and to the new modes engendered by the explosion of digital snapshots. Printed photos are expensive, we select just a few and put them in order, often by year, sometimes with labels like “Family Vacations.” But with digital images, not only do we generate many more of them, as it’s easier to keep than cull them, the camera automatically assigns them obscure identifiers like DSC00165.jpg. On the one hand, this is classic disorder, thousands of files with inscrutable names on multiple devices. But for Weinberger, “the solution for an overabundance of information is more information.” (p. 13) Thus, we can give the images a huge variety of labels, or tags, slot them into one virtual album or many, tag them with very personal references for our own use, or post them to Web with more general identifiers so that anyone interested in searching for them might well be able to find them. 

“Everything Is Miscellaneous” embraces this disorder, insisting that “we have to get rid of the idea that there’s a best way of organizing the world.” (p. 10) This shift is a result of more powerful search features in networked environments: what matters is not how accurately you label and position something in digital space, it’s how widely you allow others to cast their nets and capture your contribution. What you want to provide, and to have others provide you, is “faceted classification,” (p. 78), taking advantage of the ways in which “computers have become demonically good at sorting through gigantic, complex piles of information.” (p. 85)

Weinberger is trying to get a handle on the transformations that broadband networks, ubiquitous access, fast processors, huge hard drives, and vast databases bring about in both culture and commerce. The neologisms fly fast and furious: folksonomies (taxonomies created by average folks rather than professional archivists) and spimes (objects that are aware of their position in space and time) intertwingle (you can figure that out by yourself) with wikis (sites that users can enter and modify easily, from the Hawaiian for “quick”) and the Semantic Web (an effort by the founder of the World Wide Web and others to standardize a language for metadata).

The author’s attraction to miscellany is obvious, but clarity is called for in a project like this. Rather than synthesizing, Weinberger follows the formula “New Yorker” superstar Malcolm Gladwell established in his bestsellers, “The Tipping Point” and “Blink,” cycling from personal anecdotes to potted histories to business case studies. So we get a discussion of the difference between Weinberger’s wife’s meticulous organization of their silverware drawer and the way Weinberger’s old college buddies just rooted around in a pile for knives and forks; overlong disquisitions on biological taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus and Melvil Dewey’s decimal library system; and claims that the BBC is “radical” and Staples “revolutionary” (remember those overused words from the last boom?). It’s not that there aren’t good things to be learned from “Everything Is Miscellaneous,” just that they seem somewhat, well, miscellaneous. So fun trivia – like the fact that a German pastor condemned Linnaeus’s classifications of plants by their sexual characteristics as immoral – obscures insightful analyses like the one that Weinberger offers on how Wikipedia, the amateur user-generated encyclopedia, regulates itself so well.  

The connectionist composition of the arguments – first this, then that, and then yet another thing – occasionally makes “Everything Is Miscellaneous” read like a primer on postmodernism for corporate marketers. There is also such celebration of the random that Weinberger ignores one of the prime reasons that we try to impose order on our chaotic environments. There is only so much time that we are allotted in this life, and we have to engage in what I’ve come to call “info-triage,” ruthlessly selecting rather than simply adding. So when Weinberger lists a dozen plus items of metadata about “Moby Dick,” what he doesn’t quite get to is how you will actually read this 208,968 word masterpiece with a “Fog Index (a standard measure of readability)… of medium difficulty” (p. 120) if you spend so much time loping through statistical indices. Weinberger writes eloquently that “The task of knowing is no longer to see the simple. It is to swim in the complex.” (p. 198) “Everything Is Miscellaneous” gets us down to the shore, but teaches us few new strokes.