A Light Shining Through the Mess

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When I read the title of chapter 9 in Everything is Miscellaneous, titled, “Messiness is a Virtue”, I’m not going to lie, I was pretty excited. As someone who should probably clean her room a little more often, I was intrigued by the possibility that maybe messiness had a little more to it than just laziness. And to an extent, it does.

While, dumping last week’s garbage all over the floor can hardly be called productive, if not plain gross, there can be an aspect of putting things out of order that makes them more accessible. Thomas Hyde, a librarian at Bodleian Library understood this concept well. He placed Shakespeare, Shakspeare, Shakspere, and Shaxberd all together in one category, defying alphabetical order, with the objective of making them easier to find.

I can even see examples of this in my own room. For instance, I have a random granola bar placed on top of my Economics books, which are sitting on my desk. This granola bar was taken from its box in the food section of my room and placed with my schoolbooks in order to remind me to take it with me tomorrow morning. Even though it is not in its “proper” category, with the food items, it much more useful out of place.

However, the only pitfall of disorder in the physical world is that a certain order may only be useful to one person. What if my roommate thinks that all granola bars should be with the cereal, oatmeal and other breakfast items? How would we reach a compromise?

This is hardly a problem in the digital world. If you upload digital pictures, your computer automatically captures the metadata and arranges them into categories based on the date, who uploaded them, and what type of camera was used. Then, if you upload the photos to Flickr, people can start adding tags to them and categorizing them in different ways. The computer then takes these different categories and creates relationships between the photos, thus making them easier to find.

The more information added in, the more useful it becomes. Personally, I love this concept of the ability of technology to make something useful out of what seems like an unsalvageable disaster.