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1-Page Summary of Everything Is Miscellaneous
Getting Reorganized
The Internet has changed how people organize information. It enables users to have control over their preferences and allows them to browse pages in a random order, which is different from the way books are organized in libraries. The Internet also gives us the ability to search for content based on individual interests, such as buying habits.
Finding information is important in this day and age. People can find it on the Internet, which has become more important than physical reality.
In the past, people would go into stores and look for items based on how the store was organized. If they were just looking around, they could browse until something caught their eye. The digital world is similar to that in that you can find things according to your interests even if you’re not sure what exactly you want.
Shoppers can now purchase music through iTunes. This gives them the flexibility to find exactly what they want and create their own collections. Apple has taken advantage of this opportunity by selling more than 70% of digital music sales.
Digitalization has made it easier to find things, but at the same time, there is more clutter because of all the information available. For example, digital camera owners have a lot of photos at their disposal and they can take as many pictures as they want without paying anything extra. However, that also makes it harder to sort through them and find what you’re looking for. People tend to keep too many bad pictures in poorly marked folders on their computers. Renaming those files with better file names will make it easier to sort out good from bad photos and organize them accordingly so that you can use them later when needed. Computers are great at organizing information in many different ways; however, often times the cure for informational clutter is providing more detail about your information so that people can easily categorize it into smaller groups or categories based on whatever criteria they choose (e.g., subject matter).
The Library of Congress receives more books than Thomas Jefferson donated in 1815. It’s a daily occurrence, so the library has to have an efficient system for organizing these books. No such formal classification system exists for Internet pages, though people upload seven million Web pages every day.
Many institutions are trying to organize the digital world in a way that makes sense. The Dewey decimal system was created in 1876 and it’s still used by libraries to organize physical books. However, critics find the system outdated because there is only one place for each book on the shelf, which isn’t practical in today’s electronic environment where we can list a book under multiple categories and still be able to find it easily.
Amazon has no such constraints. They have millions of books on their site and use multiple categorization techniques, including “collaborative filtering” based on the viewers’ preferences and buying habits.
Customized Searches
Amazon lists products in multiple categories so that people can find things based on what they’re looking for. For example, someone who’s looking for a TV might want to look at TVs under the Electronics category and then LCD TVs under the Electronics subcategory. However, some people might be interested in other types of electronics besides just TVs, so Amazon allows them to view all kinds of electronics instead of just TVs. Some companies use “faceted classification” systems that allow users to create search criteria based on their own interests and goals.
Wikipedia is truly an open architecture website. It allows users to post articles on any topic they want, and it’s available in over a hundred languages. This contrasts with the Encyclopedia Britannica‘s rigid design, which limits information access by alphabetical order. Wikipedia illustrates how the Internet has enabled people to access knowledge more freely than ever before.
