Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything

I am an unabashed fan of “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web,” which Morville wrote with Lou Rosenfeld. A few years ago, I read “Ambient Findability” from Morville and was deeply disappointed – it was all elaborate and fluffy theory, with no practical relevance.

Almost unbelievably, this book is worse.

For the life of me, I can’t figure out what the hell Morville is talking about. The book is part IA, part philosophy. Morville talks about Bhuddism a lot, both explicitly and in reference to concepts. His main point seems to be that all information is…muddled together? Complicated? Messy? Imperfect? At least, I think that’s the point he was trying to make.

There’s only five chapters and it’s a quick read. The only reason I’m not giving this one star is because the chapter on “culture” seems to make a little sense. And it’s the only chapter where he seems to actually be talking about information science at all.

If there was a larger point to this book other than the obvious point that information is complicated and messy, then I completely missed it.