Post Two

Post Two

“The Geography of Knowledge” in Dave Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous seems very similar to the chapters that precede it. Within this chapter, we get an example of “how it was once done” compared to “how it is done today” – Out with the old in with the new, I guess you could say. The chapter opens up with the Dewey Decimal system. When Weinberger describes the Dewey Decimal system and the work that goes into running it successfully, he sounds like my father when he gets home from a long day of work. Weinberger does a good job of demonstrating how stressful the old way of shelving books in a library was, and goes on to say that once one part of the library spectrum changes, every thing has to change – which only adds to the stress. You get the idea that Weinberger is trying to say that ideas, philosophies, text, etc. change too quickly in the present day to be able to set up a library with the Dewey Decimal system.

This is when Weinberger begins to write about the “new way” to go about classifying a system. Really though, he says to just throw out the idea of having categories and orderliness of the system: “When it comes to categorization, Amazon[.com] doesn’t care about the precision and orderliness of its system; it cares about putting information – and offers – in front of you.” He goes on to say that they do this by linking books to other books through the multiple different listings you could bookmark the selection with. He uses a historical cookbook as an example, and says it is listed as just a cookbook under one call code in a usual library. However, on Amazon.com it is listed by author, historical fiction, and cooking. This helps customers try to find other books that relate to it, which makes me wonder whether or not Amazon is actually trying to help organize the world of literature easier, or if they’re just trying to sell more books. I think the answer is easy.

One example of this “listing” system that I use a lot is on Cdnow.com. It kind of frustrates me, because I listen to your typical college rock bands that you only see on the “top ten lists of college radio” in the back of Rolling Stone magazine, or during select hours of Potsdam’s radio station. Because of this (and I’m sure other fans of other genres have the same problem), when I type in a specific band that I am looking for on the website, the same 40 or so bands pop up in the “other bands you might be interested in” box at the bottom of the screen. This never leads me in the direction to find other bands that I am interested in, since I know most of them already. Maybe Weinberger’s system that he says is so easy to update is time for an update, or maybe people who listen to the same music as me need to find something else to listen to?