categorization as political act: everything is miscellaneous

Yes, I just finished reading a book about the many effects classifying information has on the world, meaning, and knowledge. And no, this is not the first of such books in my library...

David Weinberger's new book, Everything is Miscellaneous is a pretty gentle romp through the world of information, knowledge, meaning, classification, categorization, lumping & splitting, and taxonomies (if such a thing can exist). In describing it as "gentle," I guess I mean that it takes a pretty casual and chatty approach to a pretty complex topic. Which upon further reflection, I suppose is a compliment. Let's just put it this way: I didn't feel as intellectually beat up as I did when reading Wealth of Networks.

The usual suspects of Google, Amazon, del.icio.us, Flickr, and Wikipedia all make an appearance to demonstrate these ways of organizing information and metadata in action. It's categorized (ironically perhaps) as "Business" on the back of my edition and I think that's a safe bet -- those without a large grounding in philosophy, information science, classification systems, or library science can still appreciate this book.

In taking a quick look at the companion blog for the book, I found a link to Cory Doctrow's interview with David Weinberger up on the Wired blog.

It's interesting how something you read and something you listen to have two different effects. I like the fact the transcript is below on that post, as it allows me to cut and paste this little gem from Cory Doctrow, commenting on the political ramifications of how we classify things....

Cory: Right. Or, you say that it's a genuine religious experience of Numanis and I say that it's a hallucination triggered by a center of your brain left over from when some distant ancestor of yours discovered that by hallucinating a god figure, he was able to survive longer, catch more antelopes, and therefore have more babies. And so, I want to classify this as hallucination engendered by accident of evolution and you want to classify it as genuine religious experience. I have a feeling that both of us would be slightly peeved if the other's label were applied to it.

If you're wondering what the hell any of that means, I suggest you listen to the interview. And if any of that is of interest, go find yourself a copy of the book.