The New Order Of Order

As a species, human beings love organization. But as technology progresses, how are we changing the way we group and label information? Is the digital world helping us achieve the organizational utopia which we've always longed for, or is it making us more miscellaneous than ever? That is the central question that David Weinberger grapples in Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. In order to understand how the digital age is changing the way we store information, we must first explore and understand what Weinberger terms "the orders of order".

The first order of order is the actual organization of matter. We store our books on the book shelf while our groceries are kept in the refrigerator. In this order, there is little room for the miscellaneous. Every item is limited to one location, forcing categorization. Personally, I am very disorganized, especially when it comes to CDs and DVDs. Whenever my mom would come into my room, she would yell at me to take better care of my movies so that they don't get lost and I know where to find them. I tried to explain, to no avail, that my DVDs we're completely organized, just in a structure that was specific to me. The video games go in a pile next to the Xbox and the DVDs go in a stack underneath the DVD player. The first order of order is utilized by all individuals, regardless of how organized a person is or isn't. One person's mess is another's constructively organized chaos.

However, as the quantity of organized items increase, the retrieval process becomes tedious and painful. In comes the second order of order: the card catalog. The card catalog has both its pros and cons. It is beneficial in providing important information about the queried item. However, a large catalog can take time to flip through, and furthermore, the physical limitations of the card hinder the amount of information that can be printed.

"The problems with the first two orders of order", Weinberger notes, is "that they arrange atoms. There are laws about how atoms work". However, the third order of order does not have to abide by these laws. Once a picture or an item is brought into the digital world, it can be put into an infinite quantity of folders and be labeled in any way imaginable. While this creates countless benefits for information seekers, it also creates a miscellaneous order that allows countless combinations of organization.

I believe the most astounding aspect of this miscellaneous order is what Weinberger declares at the end of the chapter. "The miscellaneous order is not transforming only business. It is changing how we think the world itself is organized and-perhaps more important-who we think has the authority to tell us so". I think this is a very powerful notion because it asserts that the common people have a strong influence on matters that we're once out of their control.