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Footnote

Rez. in: JASIST. 56(2003) no.12, S.1360 (C.Tomer): "Humanizing Information Technology is a collection of essays that represent what are presumably Julian Warner's best efforts to understand the perpetually nascent discipline of information science and its relationship to information technology. It is clearly a formidable task. Warner succeeds occasionally in this endeavor; more often, he fails. Yet, it would be wrong to mark Humanizing Information Technology as a book not worth reading. On the contrary, though much fault was found and this review is far from positive, it was nevertheless a book well-worth reading. That Humanizing Information Technology succeeds at all is in some ways remarkable, because Warner's prose tends to be dense and graceless, and understanding his commentaries often relies an close readings of a wide array of sources, some of them familiar, many of them less so. The inaccessibility of Warner's prose is unfortunate; there is not a single idea in Humanizing Information Technology so complicated that it could not have been stated in a clear, straightforward manner. The failure to establish a clear, sufficiently füll context for the more obscure sources is an even more serious problem. Perhaps the most conspicuous example of this problem stems from the frequent examination of the concept of the "information society" and the related notion of information as an autonomous variable, each of them ideas drawn largely from Frank Webster's 1995 book, Theories of the Information Society. Several of Warner's essays contain passages in Humanizing Information Technology whose meaning and value are largely dependent an a familiarity with Webster's work. Yet, Warner never refers to Theories of the Information Society in more than cursory terms and never provides a context füll enough to understand the particular points of reference. Suffice it to say, Humanizing Information Technology is not a book for readers who lack patience or a thorough grounding in modern intellectual history. Warner's philosophical analyses, which frequently exhibit the meter, substance, and purpose of a carefully crafted comprehensive examination, are a large part of what is wrong with Humanizing Information Technology. Warner's successes come when he turns his attention away from Marxist scholasticism and toward historical events and trends. "Information Society or Cash Nexus?" the essay in which Warner compares the role of the United States as a "copyright haven" for most of the 19th century to modern China's similar status, is successful because it relies less an abstruse analysis and more an a sharply drawn comparison of the growth of two economies and parallel developments in the treatment of intellectual property. The essay establishes an illuminating context and cites historical precedents in the American experience suggesting that China's official positions toward intellectual property and related international conventions are likely to evolve and grow more mature as its economy expands and becomes more sophisticated. Similarly, the essay entitled "In the Catalogue Ye Go for Men" is effective because Warner comes dangerously close to pragmatism when he focuses an the possibility that aligning cataloging practice with the "paths and tracks" of discourse and its analysis may be the means by which to build more information systems that furnish a more direct basis for intellectual exploration.
Like Daniel Bell, the author of The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), who used aspects of Marx's thinking as the basis for his social forecasting models, Warner uses Marxist thought as a tool for social and historical analysis. Unlike Bell, Warner's approach to Marx tends to be doctrinaire. As a result, "An Information View of History" and "Origins of the Human Brain," two of the essays in which Warner sets out to establish the connections between information science and information technology, are less successful. Warner argues, "the classic source for an understanding of technology as a human construction is Marx," and that "a Marxian perspective an information technology could be of high marginal Utility," noting additionally that with the exception of Norbert Wiener and John Desmond Bernal, "there has only been a limited penetration of Marxism into information science" (p. 9). But Warner's efforts to persuade the reader that these views are cogent never go beyond academic protocol. Nor does his support for the assertion that the second half of the 19th century was the critical period for innovation and diffusion of modern information technologies. The closing essay, "Whither Information Science?" is particularly disappointing, in part, because the preface and opening chapters of the book promised more than was delivered at the end. Warner asserts that the theoretical framework supporting information science is negligible, and that the discipline is limited even further by the fact that many of its members do not recognize or understand the effects of such a limitation. However cogent the charges may be, none of this is news. But the essay fails most notably because Warner does not have any new directions to offer, save that information scientists should pay closer artention to what is going an in allied disciplines. Moreover, he does not seem to understand that at its heart the "information revolution" is not about the machines, but about the growing legions of men and women who can and do write programming code to exert control over and find new uses for these devices. Nor does he seem to understand that information science, in the grip of what he terms a "quasi-global crisis," suffers grievously because it is a community situated not at the center but rather an the periphery of this revolution."

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Abstract

Human beings are information omnivores: we are constantly collecting, labeling, and organizing data. But today, the shift from the physical to the digital is mixing, burning, and ripping our lives apart. In the past, everything had its one place--the physical world demanded it--but now everything has its places: multiple categories, multiple shelves. Simply put, everything is suddenly miscellaneous. In Everything Is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger charts the new principles of digital order that are remaking business, education, politics, science, and culture. In his rollicking tour of the rise of the miscellaneous, he examines why the Dewey decimal system is stretched to the breaking point, how Rand McNally decides what information not to include in a physical map (and why Google Earth is winning that battle), how Staples stores emulate online shopping to increase sales, why your children's teachers will stop having them memorize facts, and how the shift to digital music stands as the model for the future in virtually every industry. Finally, he shows how by "going miscellaneous," anyone can reap rewards from the deluge of information in modern work and life. From A to Z, Everything Is Miscellaneous will completely reshape the way you think--and what you know--about the world.

Footnote

Rez. in: Publishers Weekly. May 2007: "In a high-minded twist on the Internet-has-changed-everything book, Weinberger (Small Pieces Loosely Joined) joins the ranks of social thinkers striving to construct new theories around the success of Google and Wikipedia. Organization or, rather, lack of it, is the key: the author insists that "we have to get rid of the idea that there's a best way of organizing the world." Building on his earlier works' discussions of the Internet-driven shift in power to users and consumers, Weinberger notes that "our homespun ways of maintaining order are going to break-they're already breaking-in the digital world." Today's avalanche of fresh information, Weinberger writes, requires relinquishing control of how we organize pretty much everything; he envisions an ever-changing array of "useful, powerful and beautiful ways to make sense of our world." Perhaps carried away by his thesis, the author gets into extended riffs on topics like the history of classification and the Dewey Decimal System. At the point where readers may want to turn his musings into strategies for living or doing business, he serves up intriguing but not exactly helpful epigrams about "the third order of order" and "useful miscellaneousness." But the book's call to embrace complexity will influence thinking about "the newly miscellanized world.""

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Footnote

In Chapter 5, the "Election Issue Tracker" is introduced. The Election Issue Tracker calculates currency that is defined as "frequency of mentions of the issue terms per newspaper and across newspapers" in the three major national newspapers. The Election Issue Tracker is used to study which issues resonate with the press and which do not. As one would expect, Rogers found that not all issues that are considered important or central to a political party resonate with the press. This book contains a wealth of information that can be accessed by both researcher and practitioner. Even more interesting is the fact that researchers from a wide assortment of disciplines, from political science to information science and even communication studies, will appreciate the research and insights put forth by Rogers. Concepts presented in each chapter are thoroughly described using a wide variety of cases. Albeit all the cases are of a European flavor, mainly Dutch, they are interesting and thought-provoking. I found the descriptions of Rogers various information instruments to be very interesting. Researchers can gain from an examination of these instruments as it points to an interesting method for studying activities and behaviors on the Internet. In addition, each chapter has adequate illustrations and the bibliography is comprehensive. This book will make for an ideal supplementary text for graduate courses in information science, communication and media studies, and even political science. Like all books, however, this book had its share of shortcomings. While I was able to appreciate the content of the book, and certainly commend Rogers for studying an issue of immense significance, I found the book to be very difficult to read and parse through. The book is laden with jargon, political statements, and even has several instances of deficient writing. The book also lacked a sense of structure, and this affected the presentation of Rogers' material. I would have also hoped to see some recommendations by Rogers in terms of how should researchers further the ideas he has put forth. Areas of future research, methods for studying future problems, and even insights on what the future might hold for information politics were not given enough attention in the book; in my opinion, this was a major shortcoming. Overall, I commend Rogers for putting forth a very informative book on the issues of information politics on the Web. Information politics, especially when delivered on the communication technologies such as the Web, is going to play a vital role in our societies for a long time to come. Debates will range from the politics of how information is searched for and displayed on the Web to how the Web is used to manipulate or politicize information to meet the agendas of various entities. Richard Rogers' book will be of the seminal and foundational readings on the topic for any curious minds that want to explore these issues."