[Disclosure: I'm connected to David Weinberger through a web of mutual interests and conference-attendance. I read his blog. David is a member of the OneWebDay board.]
This is a book that was written to be blogged about. (Other blog entries are here.) I'm confident its author, David Weinberger, often thought to himself “So why am I writing a book if the world I’m writing about exists online?” So let me rush to assure him that I am glad he wrote this book. We still need books, which give us sustained single voices talking to us and can be conveniently carried around so as to be read on quiet trains or in quiet rooms. It may be an old-fashioned medium, a book, but this one is written humbly and with no great claims to authoritative “last word” status. And it’s good.
This lovely book was written to be taken apart – in a good way. It asks us to reflect on how the great worlds of knowledge and authority have been changed beyond recognition by the advent of the internet.
In my view, which is only one of the thousands of views about this book (and that’s the way it should be), I think this book was written to bridge gaps between the people that are baffled by the web and the people that aren’t. The people that aren’t may find instant anachronisms – mentioning X new business when X is already merged into Y, how slow! and why on earth didn’t he write about Z? – but the people that are baffled (even a little baffled) will need to sit back in their collective chairs and consider.
Weinberger has written (or, at least, I think he has written – he may differ) about the distinction between information and knowledge, and between knowledge and authority. And he’s letting us know that online groups of various kinds, consciously and unconsciously, without necessarily having any direction, are rewriting these distinctions and restating how they work. Finally, he’s telling us that this is a great and joyous development.
Many wiser minds than mine have written about these distinctions. Now, these distinctions fall apart at their margins, like the differences between atoms and bits. You could say that a map is “information” and the best route between Boston and New York is “knowledge” – but as Weinberger makes clear, the map itself represents a judgment about what’s important to its particular audience. But leaving that alone, we could say that we know the difference between information and knowledge. We could bluntly say that information is unprocessed – a train schedule, a laundry list. Some mind or machine processes that information in some way, by pointing to it or using it somehow, and metainformation (compressed, useful, expressive, having quality) emerges. Metainformation, in turn, can be processed by human minds in ways that causes knowledge to emerge. No sharp lines here, just sharpening and turning and pattern-revealing. At some point, who knows when, knowledge can emerge as authoritative, relied on by others, agreed-to. (My cousin Benjamin Reeve has written about “metainformational depth” and the quality that attaches to metainformation.)
What’s amazing about the online world, what makes Weinberger need to write this book, is that it enables everyone to participate in these emergent processes. We could look at the amount of information available online and just shudder. (My mother does this when she’s thinking about arranging for a stay in a hotel across the country. Hi, Mom!) Or we could say bravely that the ability to tag and disaggregate and reaggregate splinters of digital information in ways that we find sympathetic is an extraordinarily powerful skill that we are just beginning to learn. It’s not so much that everything is miscellaneous but that nothing need be. Shards of information are forever being gathered online, creating individual “knowledge” that is revelatory. Weinberger finds music in the spaces between the notes, in the intersections and gaps and collections that make up online group-created knowledge.
In The Machine Stops, a short story by E.M. Forster that I keep pointing to across the years, the main character takes a journey across the physical world to visit her son. They have been joined only by electronic communications for a long time. She is unaccustomed to movement, and trembles when she climbs aboard the almost-empty airship – people have stopped traveling. She thinks that only the machine, a very centrally-run machine, can give her new ideas, and she has begun to worship it. When the airship is above the Greek islands she draws the shade closed, afraid of the sun, and says to herself, “No ideas here.”
Weinberger turns this vision inside out. The internet is not the machine that Forster was afraid of. Instead, because anyone can publish and link and annotate, and no one is in charge, the internet can reveal the wealth of ideas and interactions that we could only approximate in the past by musing about ancient Greece. It isn’t visible, this emergent miscellany-knowledge, you can’t see the boundaries of the islands, but it’s amazing nonetheless. We needn’t worship the machine, because there isn’t really “a machine” – just a sea of all-of-us in which meaning is constantly emerging. Here’s a lovely moment towards the end of Weinberger’s new book:
So thanks to David Weinberger for writing this book. Small Pieces Loosely Joined (also written by Weinberger) was a very important book for me because it made me think about the web as a cultural construct rather than a curiousity. I’m glad he wrote this one, and I treasure its expression of emergent discovery.