Everything is Miscellaneous

I have just started reading David Weinberger's newest book, Everything is Miscellaneous: The power of the new digital disorder, and I was struck (again) by the enormity of the change in which we are in the midst.

Weinberger explains in some detail the task that the Library of Congress professionals face as they must catalog seven thousand new books a day. Weinberger goes on to say:

The Washington Post estimates that seven million pages are added to the web every day. Search on Google for "Amercian History", which is just one Library of Congress subheading, and you'll get 750 million Web pages — about twenty-six times the number of books in the Library's entire book collection.

But the online image-sharing application, Flickr, has more than 225 million photos already uploaded by users and almost a million are added every single day.

Now it is us, the people, who make sense of all of what Weinberger calls the "miscellaneous". We can arrange whatever photos into whatever order we want, and then change that order whenever we need. We add our own categories, based on what makes sense to us.

It is this, the miscellaneous order that Weinberger says, "is changing how we think the world itself is organized and — perhaps more important — who we think has the authority to tell us so."