In David Weinberger’s “Everything is Miscellaneous” he discusses some very interesting points. The prologue goes in depth about how the popular office supply chain Staples organizes its stores. He goes into detail about why items are organized the way they are. He makes a very valid point, which I found to be one of the most important points of the chapter, about how everything cannot be within arms reach of the customer at all times. He calls it “operational simplicity.” It’s the idea that you must organize things to their fullest potential so as not to frustrate the customer but to provide a cohesive and effective organizational structure that uses the space in the most effective and user friendly way possible.
The first chapter discusses organization and the three levels of organization. I found it interesting how he related iTunes to this organization method. Personally, I always found iTunes to be very well organized, but Weinberger does not find it to be effectively organized. The three tier organization organizes things by sorting them into large sections first (e.g. genres on iTunes), then smaller categories (e.g. artists), then finally into the smallest sections where you can find each object (e.g. albums leading you to a list of songs). I think this form of organization is much more effective than what chapter two discusses: alphabetizing.
Weinberger discussed alphabetization. The major point of this chapter was that the alphabet itself is miscellaneous, yet we have socially constructed it into something that makes sense to us. Without an alphabet, everything would truly be random and each person could set their own ideals for how things should be organized. The idea of the alphabet is a great idea, it provides order for the chaos of information we are bombarded with on a daily basis, but it becomes unfair when people abuse the alphabet.
One thing my roommate and I spend a great deal of time organizing in our apartment is our movies. We have over 500 DVD’s to sort through each time we want to watch a movie. We had to split them up into two different shelves in two rooms. We chose our favorite 100 DVD’s to have in our living room and easily accessed, then we alphabetized them. We originally tried to organize them by genre, then alphabetize the genres but we ran into too many troubles with deciding where to draw the line between genres and whether to subdivide the comedy section into romantic comedies and slapstick comedies. We simply decided to organize the entire library instead. It works because when we want to find a particular movie, it is easy to find and there is no dispute over which genre it should be in.
When it comes to organization you point out a key factor, that some organizations are better or worse than others. As you stated, one way of organizing your movies is better than the other. The same is true for nearly everything and on top of that, many people have different preferences when it comes to organization. Some may just want to sort the movie collection alphabetically and call it a day while others might want it by release date. In the digital world there are more options and it's easier for people to get what they want.
ReplyDeleteI agree that when it comes to organizing movie, music and books it is hard to place them in one genera. It is clever to simply order your movies in alphabetical order and not to add another layer of grouping. I relate that back to how a computer works folder within a folder within a folder to find the file you want. With eliminating the genera folder in real life you can gain access to the movie you want faster!
ReplyDeleteI also found it surprising that the author didn't think that the iTunes way of organization was very efficient or put together well. I know Apple is always updating and changing the iTunes program. I wonder when this book came out iTunes was different with the whole organizing aspect?
ReplyDeleteI have the same problem with my DVD's! Although i only own half of what your apartment does, what works for me is organizing them by genre. Usually when my roommates or I am in the mood for a movie we have a specific genre in mind that we want to watch, so it is much easier to sort through them all to pick what we want to watch. But to each his own!
ReplyDeleteThis kind of shows though that since the increase in technology and amount of things people save and organize, it has led to many different ways to organize, and therefor lead to a world that will probably never have a universal organization.
I also alphabetize my DVD collection. I find that not having it sorted into genres is actually very helpful. I almost never browse my own DVD's and so needing to see them by genre seemed pointless. Instead I always look with a title in mind and alphabetizing makes it a lot easier to find a specific title. I still ran into some problems when first starting this system like how to treat titles that started with "The". Eventually I decided to just figure the into the schema and file them under T. It makes for a large T's section but I don't see that as a huge problem.
ReplyDeleteOverall this is a really good post. Work on being a bit more specific with the reading. You have some great generalizations here (eg: saying he delineates orders of order) but could've been more specific (eg: describing exactly what those orders are).
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