Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences

"Sorting Things Out by Geoff Bowker and Susan Leigh Star was an extremely influential book on me and influences my work to this day, including my work on technology. Technologies almost always rely on systems of classification and organization. One might think of Apartheid as a political system, but it was also in some sense a technological system, in that people were classified based on who they were racially within that society. They were provided with opportunities—or not—based on that. You can actually experience that if you go into the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg. It’s incredible. What Bowker and Star argue is that how knowledge and information is organized and classified actually ends up defining what counts as knowledge and what we understand to be true or not true. They make the point with relation to library classification systems, for example. The Dewey Decimal System, for example, was largely comprised of Christian subject headings, because it’s a technology that was created by a Christian man within a Christian society. It therefore reflected the biases of that man and his knowledge. So that’s very important, because a lot of l technological systems rely on databases and how databases classify information has everything to do with how that information is treated and what’s considered relevant and what isn’t. We build technological systems based on who we are. Feminists have also pointed out that women’s issues have been left out of a lot of database systems. This is an important book for forming an intellectual and critical blueprint for the organization of knowledge itself. That’s a theme that people as renowned as Michel Foucault wrote about, dating back. It’s about a philosophy of knowledge and what counts as knowledge. A lot of diverse cultures and non-western communities don’t define knowledge in a static manner the way that the western Enlightenment did and the way that currently informs our tech world. My first book, Whose Global Village? was a full-on analysis of some of these themes and that book, Sortings Things Out , continues to inform me. It’s a really good book. I really recommend it."