“We’re just never going to catch up,” writes David Weinberger inEverything Is Miscellaneous. That is, we're never going to catch up with the flood of information that is thrown at us by modern technology, especially the internet. We can never get all of our email filed, our digital pictures labeled, our calendars updated, our computers organized. Is the problem too much information, or out-of-date expectations about how information should be organized? Ken and John try to make sense of the flood of information with author and philosopher David Weinberger.
John and Ken begin by challenging their guest on his book title: ‘Everything is Miscellaneous’. Is everything really miscellaneous? Can everything really fit into the ‘there’s-no-right-category-for-this’ category?
大卫·温伯格(David Weinberger)说是的，一切都是杂项;没有一种正确的信息分类方法，世界上没有固有的信息排序。唯一的分类是我们投射到世界上的那些。但是，他强调说，这并不意味着，考虑到这些组织的特殊目的，没有哪一种排序比另一种更好。David, Ken和John带来了一些真实世界的例子来帮助他们理清这个问题的复杂性。
In the next section, Ken asks David whether the internet is really that great of an aid to the informationally-challenged: the internet can give us information on anything, but the information is often not sorted or filtered by authorities on the subject matter. At least at libraries we knew that the information we got, and categorizations thereof, was tried and true; now all we have is the new. David reminds Ken that we haven’t lost old libraries, ways of classifying, or authorities, we have gained new ones.
Ken, John, and David discuss pragmatism and more of the costs and benefits of having new options: we can better sort the world according to our individual interests, one the on hand, but on the other hand, if each person sorts information in different ways, we may lose the conventions that help us communicate.
The last segment starts off with a caller who reminds Ken, John and David, that there are some things that just don’t belong together – no matter who is interested in what. David disagrees, but they all launch into a discussion about authorities in classification in the modern digital age. Even if there is no single way of classifying information, maybe some are better than others. But in the digital age, people aren’t forced to listen to any ‘authorities’ on classification: if you think a piece of information is important, you they can find someone to agree with you, and it becomes easy to call authorities those who agree with you. Despite David’s steady commitment to the wonders of information technology through the show, he ends off the by noting that this repercussion is worthy of worry, not wonder.
