Everything is Miscellaneous

"David’s book is brilliant, but I think it raises an important question. We’re doing five books and not five blog posts or five user threads or whatever, so why is a book the most important organising medium for talking about or reading about the internet? Weinberger is a guy who gets this – that the internet is a way of ordering or not ordering reality, that you stack things in a pile, that it appears to be very chaotic, that this is a fundamental change in information processing and it’s not in every way book-like or driven by narrative. I think Weinberger is an important and underrated thinker – this is a book that is easy to comprehend and is also fun. I don’t think it’s made the big splash of Clay Shirky or Sherry Turkle or some other people, but if you want my list of five then it’s got to be on it. I would say the focus on how the web works so well in spite of not having the additional message of being ordered the way, say, an encyclopaedia would or a lot of old media would be. It’s like a very messy office where we stack things in huge piles and we find new ways of making sense of it, and it looks like chaos to outsiders, but people working within the system – linking, hyperlinking, lists of favourites, bookmarks – recognise that it really does work and that it’s a revolution in how we process and order information. I don’t recall him making a prediction on that count, but I think most wise observers see the book and the web ultimately as complements. Some books will vanish, like the encyclopaedia, but the internet gets people excited about reading various books, just as your website may interest some people in reading these books."