Let 1000 taxonomies bloom!
Miscellany would seem to be post-modernism run amok. If everything is really miscellaneous,
then all organizing principles are equally valid. As hard, or perhaps as distressing,
as it may be to accept this point of view, if, for a moment, we can succeed in
disregarding the connotations, or the ramifications, of all this, we may start
to appreciate the inevitability of miscellany. We may not want the world
to be this way, but perhaps we really do perceive it in this way. In a
blog post on his Everything is Miscellaneous site, Weinberg makes what for
me is a particularly pertinent observation:
I do tend to believe that the Web touches us so deeply
because it more clearly expresses what we’ve known all along.
The first time I encountered hypertext on the web I sensed that this was something
that I had always sensed, even if I hadn't yet experienced it. In a similar
vein, even as I sometimes try to resist the ubiquity of miscellany, I find that
I harbor toward it that same sense of obviousness that I did toward hypertext.
Go to: Please organize me.