In today’s world, having the capability to search is often more important for reaching small and large goals that knowing the filing or library system. That truth is the point of David Weinberger’s other book: “Everything is Miscellaneous”. His point is that if your secretary knows the physical location of every document you have, you don’t need a filing order or arrangement. If we gave a bar code or one of those newer square codes from Japan used by smartphones to every item in the inventory of books, furniture, receipts, etc., we wouldn’t need a filing system. Just the location.
In school, we learned about alphabetization, the Dewey Decimal system and other schemes for organizing things. But now, instead of looking up tv programs, then tryng to find Downton Abbey, then looking for a list of actors in the cast, I just put “Cora’s mother” in Google and was immediately told she was played by Shirley Maclaine. So searching today can be carried out faster with a deeper specific search term immediately instead of hierarchical steps.
However, label confusion or label duplication can create errors. The physicist Sean M. Carroll and the biologist Sean B. Carroll have seemingly unique names but the truth is that without that middle initial, they can be misidentified as each other. The two men would not be confused with each other if you can see them. Databases, essentially lists of items can be searched very quickly but the descriptors need to be unique. You don’t want to have someone else’s social security number. It is easier to be unique if you are Benedict Cumberbatch than if you are Jim Harrison.
--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
