Summarize what you see as the key points from the chapters. Second, describe one thing in your life you spend time keeping organized. Describe why the order you choose works for you.
Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger provides an unique look into the way we go about organizing our lives. The book begins by talking about how browsing for items in a library has changed over the years, mostly with the help of technology. iTunes is an example, he uses, of how the user has so much control over how their own libraries of music. Mixing and matching playlists to suit every mood or feeling has allowed for a more friendlier user experience.
Chapter 1 starts out with a look into how we organize every part of our life. Whether it be storage containers to books, we always have someway of organizing each item in a way that is familiar to us. Our digital photo collection is another good example of our organization routines. We choose certain photos to upload online, while others never leave their original folders. Our photo libraries have also become so huge that we don't remember photos for their pictures, rather their id number or tag. The chapter continues as Weinberger takes an in-depth look at how these changes have occurred over time. These changes of organization don't just apply to ourselves but to other aspects of life as well. The Library of Congress has had to change how they organize their documents to keep up with the times. He then looks at three orders of organization while comparing them with the Bettmann Archive. Each order looks at a different way of organizing things. For example, providing a description of a photo for each one in your library.
Chapter 2 looks at a part of organization: alphabetization. Weinberger takes a look at how the process of alphabetization started. The notion of alphabetizing things came at a very early time, where philosophers such as Adler came up the idea of a "encyclopedia", where everything was recorded. The book then looks at how the encyclopedia came about, emphasizing on how it was organized.
One aspect of my life that I find myself organizing all the time is my library of digital media. While I do have a extensive collection of music, I find myself organizing other medias I have stored on my computer as well. For example, my movie collection is sorted by genre, while many of my other friends have memorized their libraries by "last used" or alphabetical. My pictures are also organized in a interesting manner. Photos that I want others to see I have posted on Facebook, but there are some photos (family gathering, trips, old school photos), that I have stored in a completely separate folder. I guess everyone organizes things in a way that makes sense to themselves.
I also found that one of the key concepts was best reflected by our use of digital images, and our organization of photographs. I have a very visual based memory so accessing my photographs is always easy, however if i had to tag them all individually and then search for them I would find that to be not as helpful. Organizing objects that are visual, and that can be interpreted thousands of ways is difficult.
ReplyDeleteI don't tend to organize my movies or music based on genre but I do have some of them seperated into playlists based off of genre and content. iTunes has done a good job of allowing users to categorize things several ways as they like, through playlists and such. It is always interesting to get on someone else's iTunes and attempt to look through their music since often they have it organized a completely different way.
ReplyDeleteNice summary of the first chapters; I like the fact that you commented that "The Library of Congress has had to change how they organize their documents to keep up with the times." I thought this tied really well with our discussions of web 2.0 and web squared and information constantly changing while users wanted to see changes immediately. The Library of Congress is definitely trying to stay on top of things.
ReplyDeleteI have a hard time organizing my music and movies by genre, I always find that things can fall "in-between"; then again my music and movies are not that well organized. On my computer, I let Windows Media Player do the organizing for me and learn to find my way around.
The idea that we remember photos by ID number or tag is interesting. We aren't computers and so all this extra information, like composition, who was in it, etc, has to be dumped in favor of being able to see more photos than before. This makes me wonder if we are sacrificing quantity for quality. Do we have to have access to millions of documents quickly and easily? It certainly is nice and sure, it can be super useful in certain circumstances, but data overload can be a problem. GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) seems to ring true to me sometimes.
ReplyDeleteNice post overall. You do a good job focusing on some of the key ideas from the reading. You should consider making use of my "pay attention to" notes on the schedule, as I try to focus your reading on what I see as some of the key points. In this instance, doing a bit more with the orders of order would've been useful (as it's really the foundation of his overall argument).
ReplyDeleteI really disagree with your statement here that "iTunes is an example, he uses, of how the user has so much control over how their own libraries of music. Mixing and matching playlists to suit every mood or feeling has allowed for a more friendlier user experience."
ReplyDeleteiTunes is not an example of playlists altering the way we experience music. The specific example Weinberger was using was that the shared playlists and access to individual tracks iTunes' store offers has changed the view of music we have. Your statement is basically just saying that being able to make playlists in general has revolutionized our music experience. When you think about the concept of a playlist, it's just a bunch of songs in a pre-determined order. This has been going on since way before iTunes changed the mass public's perspective on how to obtain music and the track vs. album mentality that Weinberger was talking about. Live concerts, bootleg tapings of the radio, the radio in general, pirating tracks and burning CDs before iTunes, are all examples of "playlists" combining vastly different non-album songs. iTunes does nothing whatsoever revolutionary about playlists.
I like that you pointed out we will post certain pictures online, and leave others on our computers unorganized. It shows almost what we find important to drastically organize, and what we let slip through the cracks. It's interesting to see how other people choose to organize their photos. Nice post!
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