Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room

Weinberger (Everything is Miscellaneous), a senior researcher at Harvard's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, engagingly examines the production, dissemination, and accessibility of knowledge in the Internet era. The fundamental and pertinent question Weinberger pursues is how the new surplus of knowledge afforded by the Internet affects our "basic strategy of knowing." This strategy evolved from "book-shaped thought," a form "in which parts depend upon the parts before it." Unlike books, however, Weinberger contends that long-form argument on the Internet engages a more dynamic dimension than a static book ever could: it is "put into a network where the discussion around it [...] will violate its pristine logic." Despite the slight incompatibility to long-form argument, ideas, and knowledge on the Internet are plentiful, hyperlinked, autonomous, open, and, perhaps most importantly, unsettled, making the Internet a forum within which knowledge is not merely accepted; it is contemplated and questioned. While occasionally tending towards the philosophical, Weinberger's book is full of relevant and thought-provoking, insights that make making it a must-read for anyone concerned with knowledge in the digital age. (Jan.)