18 Why classify when “Everything is miscellaneous”?

While on this topic of classifying our music resources, it would be as well to revisit the question of why at all we want to have a classified list of our possessions. Why not just keep a running list where we enter each thing as it comes, something like a “general ledger account” of day-to-day transactions?

I came upon a very interesting book on this question (yes, there are geeks who write whole books on as mundane an activity as classifying and arranging!) titled “Everything is Miscellaneous – The Power of the New Digital Disorder”, by David Weinberger (published 2007 in Times Books by Henry Holt & Company, New York, ISBN 978-0-8050-8043-0). Weinberger is described as a fellow of the Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for the Internet & Society, and an adviser and consultant for Fortune 500 companies, bestselling author, and a doctor of philosophy, so he should know a thing or two about the subject. His thesis is that the power of the computer and the Internet have placed huge databases at the call of a button, and searches on key words can be made in a fraction of  a second, so nothing really needs to be classified any more. In other words, everything can be entered in a single, massive list of all things.

The prime example Weinberger cites is, appositely, from the world of online music resources, the Apple iTunes music store, where the albums I referred to in the previous post, have been unpacked as tracks, enabling consumers to download just what they want, when they want, thereby giving Apple “more than 70 percent of the market”. The files need not be organized on your hard disk in any sort of structure, as the software allows you to search on key words any time (it will be faster, I suppose, if all the filenames and their embedded metadata (data about data!) are already indexed on every word, like Google does for the entire Internet). By giving keyword filters, we can narrow down the choice as much as we wish. Even filenames need not be intelligible (say Western-Bach-Concerto-Violin-No.1), but can just be a miscellaneous number, as the file’s embedded metadata would have information on which searches and selections can be made.

Another example Weinberger likes is the way digital cameras have generated millions and millions of pictures that are stored on the Web, viewed and exchanged and commented upon on the Web, and seldom printed out or put into albums. Here again, programs like Flickr.com have relieved the consumer or average user of the responsibility of classifying the pictures – as long as some metadata is embedded to indicate date, or maybe location, even the subject may not be all that relevant. What Weinberger says is that in order to “take full advantage of the digital opportunity – we have to get rid of the idea that there is a best way of organizing the world”.

On the other hand, if you tried this with physical objects – your collection of photographic prints or slides, or your books, or your CDs – you would end up with a big pile of stuff that you would have no way of using purposefully unless you did some sort of sorting – usually by subject, not colour or size! There actually was such a bookshop in Bangalore, where I live, which was more or less an icon – the owner could locate almost any book in his pile, but few others could. The store, sadly, closed a few years back, but another phenomenon has sprung up in many cities across the country – shops selling huge collections of used books imported by the carton (we are talking of shipping, not cardboard), sometimes even sold by weight! Most of these stores, I find, do group their books by subject matter (philosophy, gardening, health, sports, and so on).

I’m a bit old-fashioned (alas, I have not read Harry Potter, and I have already built up my collection of music on physical media), and I have to confess that even with my computer music files, I cannot help but organize them into subdirectories by composer, instrument, and form (concerto, symphony, etc.) at the very least. I still find the “album” concept convenient to record concerts, for instance – I find that the 1-hour format of most media (LPs mostly 40 to 50 minutes taking both the sides) is tailored to the average length of most performances. So even if I do manage to digitize all of them (or procure digital versions), I think I will still organize the files on my hard disk in a proper subdirectory structure, and I will probably follow a formal classification scheme like the Dewey Decimal to do so. And I will preserve the album cases and covers (especially the old LPs) for their erudite notes, beautiful graphics and illustrations, and the way they are evocative of places and events that computer files just cannot match! I’ll have occasion to describe my experiences with some of these computer classifying and cataloguing packages in future posts.