David states, "In the first order we organized things — putting similar things together (Alleyne, 2007)." David gives many examples, one of which is emptying the dishwasher — when we do this, we put similar utensils (e.g. plates and bowls) together. In the same way, the original libraries stored books alphabetically and therefore relied on a librarian to locate materials upon request. But then along came Melvil Dewey and, with the creation of the Dewey Decimal system, libraries moved to the second order. Now we could have card catalogs and organize books by subject as well as by author. The library could be opened up to visitors and we could find things without relying on a librarian who needed to have intimate knowledge of the entire collection. But books, in the second order, are reduced to 3×5 cards in a catalog and we have a few ways of organizing them — and therein lies the limitations of second order frameworks.
In the digital age, David claims, everything is miscellaneous. Welcome to the third order. He supports his thesis using a number of examples, most of them with strong web-based business models. Along came Amazon leveraging the vast capabilities of computers and techniques of collaborative filtering (’people who bought this book also bought…’) to allow us to traverse collections of books. Think about it: we are no longer told how to organize books, the community contributes to our understanding of the relationship between various books, and the organization is not static but dynamic and grows over time. With every search the collection is rearranged to match our point of reference/view.
Alleyne, J. (2007, October 27). Everything is Miscellaneous-A Must Read Book. Retrieved from http://www.slaw.ca/2007/10/27/everything-is-miscellaneous-%E2%80%93-a-must-read-book/ on November 9, 2009.
No comments:
Post a Comment