Citation
Weinberger, David. 2008. Everything is miscellaneous: The power of the new digital disorder. New York: Holt. (Amazon)
His Twitter account: twitter.com/dweinberger
In the mess left by the department store sales (first order mess) and incompatibility of the patients records (second order mess) we “feel better” when they are fixed up to the original state of order, because that is how they are organized. In the third order, the digital miscellany, the mess is a “Virtue.” As a matter of fact, the mess becomes its own order as we add metadata to our digital miscellaneous files. As the metadata is added by different users, the database generates value to the individual users just by what they need out of it. Flickr and Delicious is a mess but to each user they have their own great potential.
scribbling in the white space means drawing the organizational chart. We tend to think that simple orderly command-control structure is a good thing… well it was back in the 1800’s. command-control centers are outdated themselves. The map that shows the true organizational connections is often messy, because, if you think about it, one person at work has a working relationship with multiple people and often it is not his/her immediate supervisor. Those connections in turn create their own network with clusters of people surrounding those who do the most work in the organization. This is where we truly see how the organization operates.
Organization vs. Messiness: it is personal vs. shared. We tend to be messy during the project, often we don’t have enough visual intelligence for strong organization, but we need to find that strong continuum between access and order. Access vs. order, sometimes organization is limiting for access. photography archive – is put away in a dry dark cold area to decrease the decay of the photographs, but restricts access to it.