Miscellany and Language: A review of Everything is Miscellaneous

Styled a sparkling bright blue and interspersed with the glossy circular bits of a "new digital disorder", the jacket of David Weinberger's latest book Everything is Miscellaneous presents itself, through the implicit visual imagery of marketing metadata, as a book about digital information, about computers, and about the Internet. And there is no doubt, reading the promotional blurb on the inside of the jacket, that this is a book about digital information, about computers, and about the Internet. But it's a book about many other things as well. It's a book about such broad themes as the categorization of knowledge, the control of information, and the boundaries of meaning. It's a book about the business models of Digg, Flickr, and Amazon. And it's also a book about Melvil Dewey, Twenty Questions, and "intertwingularity".

Indeed, Everything is Miscellaneous could be described as a book "about" an endless list of different "things", a list which would likely drag out longer than the original text itself. The book is not unique in this respect; to varying degrees, one could say the same about any other book, and similar statements could be made about newspaper articles, encyclopedia entries, blog posts, and photos. There is, in fact, no real limit to the number of descriptors ― in Internet jargon referred to as "tags" ― that one can potentially attach to a given "thing", be it a book, a music CD, or a grocery item at your local supermarket. In the physical world of card catalogs, CD shelves, and stockrooms, one is ultimately forced to decide on an organizational hierarchy, assign each item to its place, and arrange things accordingly. In the digital world, however, information takes up no physical space, and this limitation is no longer relevant; a "thing" has as many "places" as one can think up meaningful words to describe it.

And this is exactly what Everything is Miscellaneous is actually "about". It is about classification: classification of physical things, classification of information, classification of knowledge, classification of meaning. And it is about miscellany, the pile of things which are leftover after classification, which do not fit into any of the prescribed categories, or which fit in too many of them. As Weinberger writes: "The world started out miscellaneous but it didn't stay that way, because we work so damn hard straightening it up" [1, p.10]. The straightening up part follows a set of rules so familiar to us that few would ever stop to think about them. In a physical space, for example, some things are nearer than others. In a physical space, only one object can be in a given spot at one time. And, since we all live in this world together, physical space is shared.

Constrained by the fundamental physical laws of "information in space", human beings have grown adept at classifying objects using what Weinberger refers to as "second-order organization" ― systems like library card catalogs ― which point to the physical space where the first-order "thing" (i.e. the object itself) actually resides. In the digital world, in contrast, one is free to classify things under an arbitrary number of different headings, a state of affairs he refers to as "third-order organization".

Second-order and third-order organization ― more appropriately termed "orders of order" ― differ fundamentally in the way that they handle scale. Comparing the top-down universality of the Dewey Decimal System to the open-endedness of Amazon.com, Weinberger explains that: "In the second order, the bigger a miscellaneous pile grows, the harder it gets to use. In the third order, piles offer exponentially more possibilities and more value the larger they get, as long as you keep them well and truly miscellaneous" [1, p.62-63], i.e. as long as you tag them with meaningful metadata, preferably lots of it. Indeed, contrary to our most basic intuition ― and contrary to everything we have been taught about such things ― the solution to the overabundance of information, in the digital world, is in fact more information.

This, the author argues, is where the miscellaneous derives its power. It's what makes the strategic placement of printer ink and DVDs in a Staples store different from the organization of photos on Flickr. It's what makes the alphabetical ordering of articles in a hard-copy volume of Encyclopedia Britannica different from the free-floating entries stitched together in the pages of Wikipedia. And it's what makes the BBC's traditional classification scheme ― one that divides content by programs, schedules, and channels ― different from the rapidly expanding web of hyperlinked personal narratives known as weblogs.

The idea of the miscellaneous is moreover not merely a new twist on the much-hyped "digital revolution". Beneath the book's flashy cover, Everything is Miscellaneous carries the reader through a series of steps to a conclusion that is ultimately both political and empowering: (a) that bits of digital information, unlike atoms, do not take up space in a physical sense; (b) that the information carried in these bits need not, as such, adhere to a single universally-prescribed categorization scheme; and (c) that consequently, the digital world frees us ― each and every one of us ― to define such schemes ourselves, independent of what anybody else might think.

This new way of dealing with information "undermine[s] some of our most deeply ingrained ways of thinking about the world and our knowledge of it" [1, p.22] by putting into question the very basis of "expert authority". Citing examples as seemingly mundane as the Dewey Decimal System and Carolus Linneus' Systema Naturae, Weinberger exposes the traditional basis of authority in a knowledge society, namely, that how society "draw[s] lines can have dramatic effects on who has power and who does not" [1, p.32]. In the digital world, such "drawing of lines" is open to personal interpretation:

We've tried to settle on a single, comprehensive framework for knowledge, with categories so clear and comprehensive that experts can put each thing in its proper place. Institutions grew to maintain the knowledge framework. Their ability to certify experts and to vouch for knowledge made them powerful and, sometimes, rich. So when the miscellaneous shakes our certainty in the nature of knowledge, more than the future of the card catalog is at stake [1, p.101-102].

What is at stake, among other things, is our definition of the "joints of nature", to use Weinberger's term. These joints are the underlying divisions in our environment, brought to our attention by "skilled thinkers" and sanctioned by the authority of science. Whereas arbitrary schemes such as the ordering of letters in the roman alphabet may ignore such joints, "our categorizations of animals into species, species into races, animals into sexes, heavenly bodies into planets, and atoms into elements reflect real, existing joints in nature" [1, p.32], or so the thinking goes. Knowledge, the ultimate aspiration of human civilization, may as such be thought of as "what happens when the joints of our ideas are the same as the joints of nature" [1, p.34].

And yet, contrary to popular belief, many of the categorizations that we take to be intrinsic and fundamental are in fact imbued with cultural values and anchored by historical precedent. Formal definition of the word "planet", an apparently straightforward task, has been held up for years by heated debate within the scientific community over issues as trivial as the inclusion of Pluto, a 75 year practice which "should trump any scientific definition" [1, p.36] according to some. In this case:

Our insistence on maintaining the category even though there is no compelling scientific reason to do so exposes a deeper meaning that is becoming more important as more realms break free of their categorical tethers and join the swirl of the miscellaneous: How we organize our world reflects not only the world but also our interests, our passions, our needs, our dreams. [1, p.39-40]

In the third-order world of digital media, where each "thing" has many places, the boundaries of knowledge undergo a shift, becoming personalized, flexible, and open-ended. The joints of the miscellaneous are the "joints at which we choose to bend nature" [1, p.45], and they are not, as such, carved in stone. "Deciding what to believe," Weinberger writes, "is now our burden" [1, p.143].

David Weinberger is a very good writer. What is more, he is a very good storyteller. Everything is Miscellaneous weaves together a narrative that is almost organic in the way that extends itself seamlessly across centuries of history and human experience, bridging academic disciplines, historical eras, schools of thought, and personal perspectives. As it openly transcends the "joints" separating traditional fields of human knowledge, Weinberger's book provides proof by example that the joints themselves are not absolute, and that we are each free to discover and shape our own.

And yet there is one joint that Weinberger neither mentions, nor transcends. It is a joint so absolute that most people in the world will not understand his ideas in the form that he has presented them. Many, indeed, will not even understand the word "miscellaneous" itself. Because while "social knowing, like the global conversations that give rise to it, is never finished" [1, p.147], no conversation can even start without a shared means of communication. The digital shift may be "blurring lines faster than we can draw them" [1, p.212], but for all its deep insights ― and there are many of them ― Everything is Miscellaneous fails to address one of the most fundamental barriers separating human populations, a joint that, in the world of the written word, underlies all others.

The "joint" is human language, and Weinberger is not alone in missing it. Indeed, while he comes tantalizingly close with a section on the "span of meaning", the discussion stops with Heidegger and McLuhan, leaving the "medium" of the message ― namely, the English language ― conspicuously missing from the picture. The reality that there are languages other than English, and that the dividing lines between such languages may constitute a barrier considerably more substantial than tags will ever overcome, is completely left out of the discussion, too implicit in the prevailing thinking, perhaps, to bear mention.

This state of affairs will not last. English may be the de facto lingua franca of the Internet, but there is growing evidence that it is rapidly being displaced from its dominant position by a motley crew of mutually incomprehensible languages appearing in the form of 32-bit fonts sprinkled with umlauts, accents, and pictograms. English is currently estimated to be the language of just over 30% of all Internet users, with Chinese close behind at 17%, and Spanish at 9%. More importantly, while English-language users have seen their numbers increase by roughly 150% since the year 2000, the change in the number of Chinese users is estimated to have nearly tripled this growth, with a rise of over 400% [2]. Despite significant technical and institutional biases maintaining the universal currency of English in computer systems, non-Western languages are making inroads into the Internet and transforming its linguistic composition [3].

Clay Shirky wrote nearly a decade ago that "in an information economy the vital protocol is language, written and spoken language," foreseeing that as trade in information replaces trade in hard goods, "the definition of proximity changes from geographic to linguistic" [4]. It is precisely this constraint of linguistic proximity, long overlooked by Internet pioneers enamored by the universality of digital protocols, that mediates our capacity "to hop over and around established categorizations with ease" [1, p.221]. If, as Ethan Zuckerman has written, it's "a safe assumption that many of [the next billion users to join the Internet] will not read English... and will not create content in English" [5], then the issue of linguistic proximity is not merely anecdotal, it is fundamental. Just as English is only one language among many, in a world in which linguistic proximity overwhelmingly determines network topology, the miscellaneous is not just one pile, but many piles. And it is bridging these piles, as much as it is bridging the gaps within them, that poses the most serious challenge to the liberation of the miscellaneous.

Everything is Miscellaneous is a fascinating book. Creating a page-turner out of topics like Luthy's Universal Alphabet and Ranganathan's Colon Classification system is itself no small feat. Perhaps it is asking too much, after hundreds of pages of pioneering insights, to expect that the author would consider every last detail, not to say details as extraneous as the choice of character set, the orientation of text, and the language of tags. But for most people in the world, these details are not extraneous. They tie down the miscellaneous by the historical tethers of Anglo-centric expansionism, substituting geographic barriers ― flattened by the digital revolution ― for linguistic ones. To truly "confront the miscellaneous directly in all its unfulfilled glory," as Weinberger suggests, is to understand that much of the miscellaneous is neither English, nor ASCII-compatible. It means turning the tables on ourselves and realizing that the new digital disorder, however miscellaneous, has an order to it. And it means appreciating that, in being able to read and comprehend so much of it, we sit in a very privileged position within this order.

REFERENCES

1. David Weinberger, Everything is Miscellaneous, Times Books, 2007. link
2. Internet World Stats, June 30, 2007. Uploaded July 23, 2007. link
3. John Paolillo, Daniel Pimienta, Daniel Prado, et al., Measuring Linguistic Diversity on the Internet, UNESCO, 2005. link
4. Clay Shirky, "Language Networks," July 7,1999. Uploaded July 23, 2007. link
5. Ethan Zuckerman, "Your language or mine?," May 10, 2006. Uploaded July 23, 2007. link