Emerging Technologies in STC

Okay class, put on your thinking caps! I'm Professor Nguyen, and I'm about to give you a lesson on everything. . . .

Well, I'm not really a professor, and I'm not really going to give you a lesson on everything. This week's assignment calls us grads as Krista wrote in the e-mail: "to post up a brief reflection on your reading, just so the rest of the class [non-grads] can know what's going on this book." We were to begin reading Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger. As Krista described in her e-mail, "Weinberger's book spends a lot of time looking at ways humans have historically approached this problem and what transferring so much information into digital environments does for the ways we order it." Before that, she had written, "Over these past couple of months, you've watched us struggle to create some sort of order for all of this information and some way for 13 disparate people to have something like a loosely workable plan." Without further ado, here is my lesson to you on 'everything' and hopefully you'll struggle no more! It is fitting that Weinberger dedicates this book to the librarians, so I am dedicating this lesson to our class. Here we go! . . .

The prologue of Everything is Miscellaneous starts off the book with Weinberger being at the Prototype Lab, which is a full-sized store mock-up of Staples. This type of setting reminded me of my days working at The Limited when I was an undergrad. Weinberger hit it right on with: "In a physical store, ease of access to information can be measured with a pedometer, and each step is precious." (Weinberger, 2007, p. 3) Later on, he asks, "But we all know how reality works, so why worry about what might be possible in some sci-fi alternate universe?" (Weinberger, 2007, p. 6) Answer: "Because the alternative universe exists. Everyday, more of our life is lived there. It's called the digital world." (Weinberger, 2007, p. 6) In the digital world, there is all this information which many probably wonder about the organization of it all.

Weinberger goes into The New Order of Order . . . "For decades we've been buying albums. . . . As soon as we went digital, we learned that the natural unit of music is the track. Thus was iTunes born, a miscellaneous pile of 3.5 million songs from over a thousand record labels. . . . Apple lets customers organize the pile any way they want and markets through their customers' choice of tracks and playlists rather than to the mass market. By making music miscellaneous, Apple has captured more than 70 percent of the market." (Weinberger, 2007, p. 9) BUT ". . . the iTunes store isn't even all that miscellaneous. It's a spreadsheet that can be sorted by the criteria iTunes provides: the track's name, length, artist, album, genre, and price. If you want to browse, first you pick the genre, artist, and album, in that order. If you want to browse by the artist and then by genre, you can't." (Weinberger, 2007, p. 9-10) So iTunes: miscellaneous but not

Weinberger goes on to talk about paper photos vs. digital photos and how we took less pictures with paper photos and more pictures with digital photos. I know I did! I remember with those disposable cameras from the 90's, I planned more carefully on what photos I would take as to not "waste photos". With the digital camera, I just shoot and shoot and shoot. Compared to my hundreds of paper photos, I will have thousands of digital photos in my lifetime, which brings us to the question of organization of the photos. "The user-based organizing of photos is already happening on a massive scale at Internet sites like Flickr.com, where people can post their photos and easily label them, allowing others to search for them. Moreover, anyone can apply descriptive labels to photos and create virtual albums made up of photos taken by themselves and strangers." (Weinberger, 2007, p. 13) Flickr and Facebook are part of our class apps. Similar to Flickr, Facebook allows photos to be labeled and albums to be created. There is also a way in Facebook to tag photos with people's names of whomever is in the photo, and the photos will be added to those persons' Facebook page. My friends have done that, and sometimes I'm like, "Ohmigod!" when I see the pics.

Something else that I was like "Ohmigod!" to was reading in Everything is Miscellaneous the part about the three orders of order (Weinberger, 2007, p. 17-23). It was somewhat confusing, but in summary:
*First order of order: organizing things ourselves (silverware in drawers, books on shelves, photos into albums)
*Second order of order: separating information about the objects from the objects themselves (catalog listing entries alphabetically by subject so you could find the object)
*Third order of order: digital order (removes the limitations of 'paper-based labeling' in how we organize information--i.e. we don't need Avery labels and printer ink toner for digital ordering)

In closing, I leave you with this . . . "Beyond alphabetical order is the purely miscellaneous: Every idea is browsable and ideas are instantly assembled into [outlines and listings] relevant to each person's particular needs and way of thinking. This is the world the digital order is creating." (Weinberger, 2007, p. 32) The focus is on you and your individual needs. You are everything! . . . and this has been a lesson on 'everything'. Thank you, class!