Harvard Business Publishing

David Weinberger is the most erudite and reflective of the hearty band of webtopians: those who believe that the web brings us varied and untold joys, with little pain. While I'm not at all a member of this tribe, I do believe the webtopians are all worth reading and engaging with. This book is a good case in point.

The main argument of Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder is that the various categories by which we organize our understanding of life have been more or less limited by the physical world. With the vast power of modern computing and the various ways the web can be used, we no longer have to use such categories and we can better exercise our imaginations and understanding through the structured miscellaneousness that cyber tools make possible.

This is an interesting argument and Weinberger presents it well. The book is well-written, well-meaning, and filled with interesting and previously unknown facts (at least unknown to me) about such folks as Melvil Dewey, Mortimer Adler, and Thomas Jefferson.

The book is also surprising in that it is dedicated to librarians -- a group whose rage for order is legendary and few of whom, I suspect, will welcome the book's message. Weinberger seems to be conducting a friendly argument with the profession. I doubt that many of them can or will adapt to what he calls "the power of digital disorder," but it's surely worth a good shot to shake them up.

It's not perfect. I wish that he had elaborated on some of the points about knowledge. A further discussion of power and politics in the world of categories would have been useful, too -- especially as one has a strong sense that these subjects are all bubbling in the author's mind.

RECOMMENDED READING:
Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder