In Everything is Miscellaneous: the Power of the New Digital Disorder,David Weinberger explains the new ways in which knowledge is being restructured because of the digital world. With the influxes of information streaming along the Internet, we must find new ways of organizing it all. Sometimes, though, the best way of organizing mass amounts of information is through the miscellaneous, through disorder. In the world of the miscellaneous, “we are rapidly miscallanizing our world, breaking things out of their old organizational structures and enabling individuals to sort and order them on the fly (p. 96).” Weinberger writes that “Over the course of the millennia, we’ve developed sophisticated methods and processes for developing, communicating, and preserving knowledge. We have major institutions—serious contributors to our culture and our economy—devoted to those tasks….Now we have to invent new ways appropriate to the new shape of knowledge. We are doing so at a pace unparalleled in our history (p. 102).” There is a revolution in knowledge coming upon us, but how are we going to keep it organized?
Weinberger begins by explaining old ways of organizing information, including how we organize our daily lives. He points out that we organize all parts of our lives to a tee, from our laundry to our books. “We invest so much time in making sure our world isn’t miscellaneous in part because disorder is inefficient…but also because it feels bad (p. 12).” Objects in our world always start out as miscellaneous, and humans work incredibly hard at reordering and straightening it up.
When it comes to the digital world, however, organizing becomes almost impossible. “Search Google for ‘American history,’ which is just one Library of Congress subheading, and you’ll get 750 million Web pages—about twenty-six times the number of books in the Library’s entire collection. The Library of Congress’s carefully engineered, highly evolved processes for ordering information simply won’t work in the new world of digital information (p. 16).” Even indexing experts have trouble controlling digital information. But it doesn’t really need to be controlled by them. Instead, it can be controlled by machines and by users. Sites like Wikipedia and Delicious are the best examples for ways the digital world organizes itself through the miscellaneous. Just as in Ambient Findablity, Weinberger compares these sites to the way early humans found their way in the world. They wore away paths, one person following the paths others had worn, until eventually paths began to fork, and signs (new tags) were needed to show which new ways the paths could take you.
When it comes to a site like Wikipedia “The best digital strategy is to dump everything into one large miscellaneous pile and leave it to the machines to sort it out (p. 88).” Wikipedia wouldn’t work if it were organized like a regular encyclopedia. Instead, Wikipedia’s servers log each way people use to access articles and uses algorithms to bring them their searches faster. This not only gives users what they need, it also gives them things they didn’t know they needed. “The gap between how we access information and how the computer accesses it is at the heart of the revolution in knowledge. Because computers store information in ways that have nothing to do with how we want it presented to us, we are freed from having to organize the original information the way we eventually want to get at it (p. 99).” A search for one thing leads to others because the servers have logged what people might be looking for. The miscellaneous factor of searching for information on the Internet actually adds to its utility.
The organizational structure of Wikipedia is completely differently than that of most knowledge, “but its shape, freed from the two dimensions of paper, better represents the wild diversity of human interests and insight (p. 100).” The usual structure of knowledge is like a tree. Things are put into categories which hang on branches. This can be troublesome because some objects can hang on many different branches at once. Putting objects into one category reveals the flaws of the indexer by showing the other possible categories it could have gone into. Delicious is a perfect example of organizing through the miscellaneous, because users can tag objects with as many tags as they want. This ensures that users will be able to find what they want in one way or another. “At Delicious, tagging a Web address with multiple tags in effect puts it on many branches. Yet despite the lack of a well-organized scheme of categories, Delicious can make a list of twenty thousand Web addresses thoroughly usable (p. 93).” There is no one way of organizing digital data. What works for one user might not work for others. Each person has different ways of ordering, which add value to the power of the miscellaneous.
Weinberger also discussed the ways in which knowledge is going through a revolution. By taking power away from organizers and indexers and putting it into the hands of taggers and searchers, knowledge is becoming more accessible.“…Physical limitations on how we have organized information have not only limited our vision, they have also given the people who control the organization of information more power than those who create the information (p. 89).”
Following is a brief summary of Weinberger’s 4 New Strategic Principles for organizing knowledge:
1. Filter on the way out, not on the way in
“…where there’s an abundance of access to an abundance of resources, filtering on the way in decreases the value of that abundance by ruling items that might be of great values to a few people. Filtering on the way out…increases the value of that abundance by locating what’s of value to a particular person at a particular moment (p. 103).”
2. Put each leaf on as many branches as possible
Delicious is a good example of this. Instead of categorizing items onto one specific branch, they are given as many labels as possible, allowing them to have better usability. This is especially important because the order of one may not be the order of another, but the many different orders of many people will be useful to at least a few.
3. Everything is Metadata and everything can be a label.
“Now that everything in the connected world can serve as metadata, knowledge is empowered beyond fathoming. We can not only find what we need based on whatever slight traces we have in our hand, we can see connections that would have escaped our notice (p. 105).”
4. Give up control.
Categorizing reveals missed information.
There are many amazing theories in Adam Greenfield’s book, Everywhere: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, I have chosen to outline the theories that I found most pertinent. This book is about ubiquitous computing, also known as pervasive computing, physical computing, tangible media, or what Greenfield refers to as “everyware.” He is theorizing on a paradigm shift, in which we will all have to “…make sense of the wave of change even now bearing down on use (p. 3).”
Thesis 2: The many forms of ubiquitous computing are indistinguishable from the user’s perspective and will appear to a user as aspects of a single paradigm: Everywhere.
There are so many different pieces of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) that it is difficult to imagine that they are all one whole. The experience of ubicomp involves “…a diverse ecology of devices and platforms, most of which have nothing to do with ‘computers’ as we’ve understood them (p. 16).” “…When we consider the difference between our experience of PCs and the thing that is coming, it is clear that … (p. 16),” there is a new age dawning, something that is too difficult, scattered and large for us to understand.
Thesis 7: Everyware isn’t so much a particular kind of hardware or software as it is a situation.
There are so many objects embedded with technology right now that it is difficult to comprehend the world in terms of hardware. Instead, “…everyware isn’t so much a particular kind of hardware, philosophy of software design, or a set of interface conventions as it is a situation—a set of circumstances (p. 31).” It is in this theory that Greenfield best describes the intangible qualities of everyware. “…there is in fact a coherent ‘it’ to be considered, something that appears whenever there are multiple computing devices devoted to each human user; when this processing power is deployed throughout local physical reality instead of being locked up in a single general purpose box…(p. 31).” This “it” is something no one can ignore, and it is creeping into our lives at all angles whether we like it (or even notice it), or not.
Thesis 8: The project of everyware is nothing less than the colonization of everyday life by information technology.
A scary theory indeed, yet the introduction of technology to the monotony of everyday life is meant as a convenience. No longer would you have to ask yourself where you hid the remote control, or why there was nothing to do on a Sunday afternoon. Greenfield argues that this does have the potential to be scary, though, as we must all wake up and take control of the direction everyware will take our lives.
Thesis 9: Everyware has profoundly different implications for the user experience than previous paradigms.
Typically, a user sits down to a computer, types in commands and gets what he or she wants. With everyware, your wants are inferred by embedded software. You no longer give commands, objects just act around you and for you.
Thesis 16: Everyware can be engaged inadvertently, unknowingly, or even unwillingly.
Put very simplistically, engaging inadvertently can be described as, “I didn’t mean to hit that button, I wanted to hit a different one;” unknowingly can be described as, “I didn’t know that hitting that button would have such an effect,” and unwillingly can be described as, “What just happened? I didn’t push any buttons!” People will interact with technology they don’t know exists. Or they may interact with it knowingly, but comply anyway for convenience.
Thesis 19: Everyware is always situated in a particular context.
In the PC world, interaction and immersion are easy to do, we can take our laptops anywhere, and be connected to the Internet at all times. Everyware is different, though, everyware takes immersion to an all-new level. “By instrumenting the actual world, though, as opposed to immersing a user in an information-space that never was, everyware is something akin to virtual reality turned inside out (p. 73).” Everyware will change the user experience by taking them off of a computer screen and into the real world.
Thesis 31: Everyware is a strategy for the reduction of cognitive overload.
With the excesses of information streaming at the users at all times, there is a fear within ubiquitous computing that more computers will directly cause more stress. In other words, “If computers are everywhere, they better stay out of the way (p. 111).” With ubiquitous computing, however, computers can be everywhere without being in the way, “…the total cognitive burden imposed by a poorly designed ubicomp on the average, civilian user would be intolerable (p.111).” Computers can be put in the periphery and only used when needed, they will not necessarily need to be called upon, and they will just do what they do without human input.