Everything Is Miscellaneous - book

Well, I'm not sure it had what I was looking for (secret of eternal youth, tip for the 3.30 at Ascot, designs for a real autoplane) but it sure was enjoyable getting what it did have.

In a sentence; modern technology means it's ok for everything to be messy - you can tag it and get it back later somehow.

(Thank goodness, because I really am terribly disorganised.)

Part of the book that struck me in particular was the atoms vs bits debate. Perhaps that's because it's relevant to me right now. It's not news that bits are weightless, have no dimensions and are infinite whereas atoms are constrained by the physical world - they need to be moved, stored, used, stored somewhere else and so on. Certainly it's been explored in a lot of the other Web 2.0 literature. Yet, really this is the fundamental difference between the pre-digital and post-digital age; atoms are atoms, but everything else can benefit from the weightless, infinite, immediate properties of digital. Weinberger states it elegantly, along with the ramifications for how we organise and use information in the future.

Where he doesn't choose to go is to look at those processes in the digital world which simply mirror physical processes. The assumptions behind them are invalid - the organisational walls that are breached will one day come down altogether and with them, a lot of our clunky existing systems and processes.

The 'include then postpone' concept is equally interesting - and equally extensible. It struck me almost as a digital motto and certainly my mind went to Google, Twitter, Facebook et al in that they first included everyone and everything they could, postponing monetisation and data use until much later. Weinberger chooses (rightly) to focus on data; it's natural to want to order things, but we must include messy data first and postpone the introduction of order until later.

There are clear themes in common with Chris Anderson's The Long Tail, Jeff Jarvis's What Would Google Do and other recent books; give control back to the people, promote creation by the masses, provide platforms for people to organise themselves elegantly.

Perhaps the only area that needs exploring more is the detail of the interface between physical and digital. The analogue to digital path is well understood I'd argue; capture through, say, a camera or microphone, add metadata, upload, share. However, the path back from digital to physical perhaps needs the most work; Weinberger references RFIDs and I started to think in terms of QRs, augmented reality and so on, but without too much success.

So I thought it was a good read. It's already part of the modern tech lexicon and rightly so. Another one of those books you'd like to distill and install directly into the memory banks of all your colleagues. It would be messy, but in a good way.