David Weinberger
Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard

& 4 ways the Internet is  making us dumber (though overall it’s making us smarter)

• Information abundant, but also abundance of crap.
• Organizations premised on the good stuff having to redefine.
• Age of information: finding out information, narrowing down to good stuff.
• Today: abundant information (showed a profile page to demonstrate)
• Exited age of information.
• Information is about reduction, web is about abundance.
• Western culture: one knowledge, one world, same for everyone. If two disagree, at most one can be right. We assume knowledge is basically simple. We assume knowledge is relatively scarce, we assume knowledge is settled. Can cluster information. With clusters, people can become experts in parts of them.
• This translates well to a traditional library.
• Andy Clark: we do our thinking in our head, but use the physical world as scaffolding.
• We’re digitizing our physical world.
• It changes our world, and how we can think.

• From knowledge by authority to hyperlinks
• We find an expert, ask a question of an expert, believe their answer.
• Opposite of transparency; gives us stopping points.
• This system of authority makes a virtue of this classification and footnote system. We require a lot of work to track down the answer. It’s not a system of transparency.
• Kindle doesn’t fix this. They’re also a disconnected medium and you can’t follow the footnotes without a lot of motivation.
• Hyperlinks as a new form of punctuation. Instead of where to stop, an invitation on where to go.
• Links express any relationship the author wants, author just has to explain the links.

• What does this do to knowledge?
• Knowledge traditionally built on driving out differences, system of sameness.
• One knowledge, same for everyone, settled, rare, independent of voice, single order.
• Showed slide of lecture, smartest person in the room is the one in front. But the smartest is the room and the connections.
• Used to managing things with metadata. Metadata is reduction of the data. Reduce what’s in a book to what’s on a catalog content.
• Separate metadata from data, use metadata to find data. Doesn’t scale well because it insists on separation of metadata from data.
• Faceted classification, semantic web, social searching, folksonomies, crowd sourcing, social tagging, mechanical turk: new ways of finding information that work pretty well.
• Good enough is good enough. In an age of good enough for information. It’s the only way this stuff scales.
• Very little chance of getting the best answer out of the trillion pages, even if we agreed on what the best answer is.
• The skills necessary
• Digital divide and skills gap: minimal set of skills and access makes a big difference. Reducing gap: that’s what teachers, educators, librarians do. This gap will always be with us, but we can work on it.
• We stay within our comfort zones online. Some say internet = diversity, some say internet = staying within our comfort zone. Something might be wrong with the formulation. The premise is that really good conversation changes your minds. People rarely do that. Most conversations aren’t about changing minds. Enlightenment ideal that has very little to do with what we’re doing. Most conversations are about reiterating our own ideas. Finding and forming alliances are what conversations are about so that we can go out and do something. This is the system: that we find people we agree with and go out to do things.
• Human understanding works by assimilating the new into what we know.
• We’re pretty lazy.
• Talked about talk page (transparency) in Wikipedia. You can use it to find out why something is included. But most people don’t know about it or use it. But that’s how knowledge scales, you ignore things.
• More words in Britannica (for some topics), less in Wikipedia (for some topics), but a LOT of links, so you chose where you’ll read more.
• It’s a survival strategy that we can’t follow every link. So we don’t.
• Talked about if Jefferson and Hamilton blogged. Look out at the world, link to their opposing views. Following link would allow the reader to see the other worldview.
• You blog because you care about the world and want to say something about it.
• Web mirrors the fundamental architecture of morality.
• Compassion and curiosity are our bulwarks.
• We are better able to actualize this because our way of thinking and tools have changed.
• The main thing the web is teaching our children: The world and its people are far more interesting than we were told.

Q&A:

• Someone recommended a General Theory of Love. DW also recommended Wealth of Networks.
• In the west we assume individualism
• Libraries deal with tension of skill building and good enough. DW: Libraries do both, and push people beyond what they might have thought of on their own.
• If everything is digitized, how will it be organized? DW: Google, multiple organizational schemes, things we haven’t invented yet. All these different ways of organizing add to our understanding of the world.
• Someone asked if this is a liberal perspective. DW: Knowledge is unsettled. Wikipedia, etc. allow us to commodity it. Pointed out that the french version of a Wikipedia article might say something different than the English version. We don’t agree on everything. Maybe it does change your politics once you realize you aren’t the only one possessing the truth.
• Audience member pointed out that your idea of good enough might change over time. Freshmen might take the first one, graduate students might want to find five sources that agree. DW: Pointed out a universe of wrong answers on what started the Civil War, but many answers that are right or being discussed among scholars. A fifth grader would only need to give the three most known ones, but a college student would need to address the differences. But that wouldn’t be good enough for a published book.
• DW: we are what we are because we’re in communities of people who see things similarly, yet we also realize that there are differences. We embrace sameness and differences at the same time.

I wanted to write up a more cohesive post, but I was entirely wrapped up in the talk, and it was all I could do to get notes on the page.  It was fabulous.  I came to this conference because of the keynote speakers, and I certainly feel like this session was worth the trip! Great way to start the day!