Since "Everything is Miscellaneous" in the digital world, we've lost our ability to neatly and succinctly place specific things into specific categories. In light of the web, things often fit into multiple categories, just when we put them in a specific spot they float away and flock with other things they find similar.
Have you read this book? If so, is it a worthwhile read?
Curious?
Dave, it’s only worthwhile if you’re interested in the way technology is changing the way information is collected, organized, retrieved, etc. I love this kind of thing. I can make a couple of recommendations: first, go to the link I’ve provided in the book’s title. Scroll down to the photo of the author and read that brief summary about information flocking. If you like that, you should like the book.
Also, David Weinberger can be found on YouTube talking about the book.. I don’t have the link handy but can add it later. The video is long and when he first gets started, I realized it might be geek speak. But quickly the video and the author engaged me and although it’s long, I loved it.
Cynthia, even though it might be geek speak – I usually find something worthwhile in every book I read. Do you know if there is an audio version of this book available? It seems that is where I get the majority of my reading done as it is during drive time. Information gathering and reporting and researching has gotten really interesting in the past year.
Every time I try to teach or preach on something I keep running into the principle that everything is related to everything. When I tried teaching on Heaven and Hell I found myself want to try to throw the entire canon of systematic theology into the course. Same thing happened when I wanted to teach on Joy. And again the same thing happened when I wanted to teach on conflict resolution.
And now that I’ll be speaking on blogging, I find it happening all over again!
The beauty of tagging is that it flattens taxonomies even while it raises whole new rugged mountainous landscapes. Who knew that there could be any posts tagged “measles” and “lawn” together? Apparently, Technorait does.
In one sense, this is liberating, because it can potentically expose just that one piece of arcane information I need to close a key knowledge gap.
But in another sense it’s debilitating because it also obscures the other pieces of information I need to make sense of this new datum.
The new way of filtering and unfiltering information puts an amazing amount of information at our fingertips. But I suspect there’s often more wisdom in knowing what not to pay attention to than in trying to pay attention to evertying, even the flotsam and jetsam of late-night surf-sessions.
I keep thinking of the book by the late Mortimer J. Adler, “How to Read a Book,” where he made the case that to be well-read meant one read well, not necessarily “a lot.” One could learn more from really reading one book well than ten books poorly. And I’m afraid our current info-saturation approach to life leads more to the latter than the former.
Okay. Now I’m rambling.
Rich.
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