Just finished reading David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. A terrific ideas-driven text, which proposes the idea that we have to relinquish the notion that there is one of way organization information hierarchies. From the Dewey Decimal System to the way we organize our CD collections, Weinberger critiques and takes a shot at everything along the way. But he does make an exellent argument: in the digital world the laws of physics no longer apply. Just take a look at your computer files, and you realize you can organize your music by any number of criteria -- artist, genre, song name, length, or price -- you name it, you've got it. Because the Web is a hyperlinked web of information that grows organically, it's really a mess out there. And Web 2.0 doesn't help at all with the glut that has emerged.
Weinberger proposes that in this new digital world, there are three planes to disorder:
(1) Physical Disorder - The natural state of disorder, when things are left as they are, disorder inevitably arises.
(2) Metadata Disorder - Because of this disorder -- lists, classification systems, hierarchies, taxonomies, ontologies, catalogues, ledgers, anything -- that brings order to the physical realm
(3) Digital Disorder - In the digital world, it makes bringing order that much more difficult, yet also that much more interesting and convenient. There are more ways than one to bring order to the chaos. Just look at Wikipedia.
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