Everything is Miscellaneous - The Video

Michael Wesch of Kansas State University has summed up David Weinberger's book Everything is Miscellaneous in a brilliant 5 minute video. Weinberger basically says information is no longer confined to the shelf as it was pre-Web/Net and we shouldn't confine ourselves to thinking about or organising it in that way when we have such fantastic tools at our disposal now to do it better. Prior to the advent of the Web and associated technologies information was kept in a file or on a shelf and managing it involved managing categories. This required experts and was still hard to do. Now it's not confined to experts or categories and assumptions about paper based information don't apply to digital information, the latter for example not necessarily having a fixed material form i.e. it can be molded or adapted to context and we can "rethink information beyond material constraints". We have links and tags etc. We're going through an information {explosion} revolution and the responsibility to

• harness
• create
• critique
• organise
• and understand

is ours (all of us); are we ready? It's essentially the up side of the Benker worldview provided we choose to make the best of it.

Have a look at the video. It really is terrific and it will be 5 minutes 28 seconds well spent: