Everything is Miscellaneous

I was really taken with David Weinberger's book, Everything is Miscellaneous. Here are some quotations and summaries from the book.

The CEO of the investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein. . . found that wikis reduced emails about projects by 75 percent and halved meeting times.

Books externalize memory. Databases externalize factual memory. . . Third-order information externalizes meaning. The content and metadata are all digital. This enables us to bring any set of content next to any other, whether through relationships intended by the authors, crafted by the readers, promoted by the companies, or created by the customers. This makes the digital miscellany fundamentally different from previous miscellanies. The value of the potential, implicit ways of ordering the digital miscellany dwarfs the value of any particular actualization ...

Our assumptions about order: simple, uniform, comprehensive, orderly, explicit. Not in third-order order, web 2.0.

Jorge Luis Borges's essay "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins." He invents a Chinese encyclopedia, the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, that divides animals into:

(a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.

Our assumptions about lists: that they have a purpose, that they have a similar relationship to the heading. (Borges list violates both assumptions.)