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June 28, 2005
Weinberger Keynote Brain Dump
The 2005 National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) kicked off in Philadelphia today with an opening keynote by David Weinberger. I haven't had a chance to write an article about what he said, so he's a brain dump of all the quotes and ideas I managed to capture. -andy
"I will never live philosopher in chief down - let that never leave this room."
His presentation, entitled "The Shape of Knowledge,"
"Darn bloggers, you can't say anything."
Knowledge is "in pretty rocky shape." He talked about Dan Rather's fall from grace; unfortunately the media portrays it as the result of a "blogger hit squad," he said the issue was that today's media doesn't have the authority it once did. "When the authorities don't even know they've lost authority, that's funny - that's comedy!"
Jon Stewart: "He's the only guy on TV capable of blurting out the truth."
Wikipedia: In a couple of hundred years, people will point to wikipedia as an "epochal event." If you want to understand what the Internet can be, you should point to Wikipedia. "By all rights it should be the world's biggest crap magnet.... But in fact, Jimbo Wales has done something remarkable."
The Greek agora: it's where affairs of state were decided. "that's where knowledge got started."
There's only one thing we can really know: I think, therefore I am. Descartes. A single sentence that even God couldn't fool with it.
Four aspects of knowledge. Two of them mirror the nature of reality, while the other measure the nature of political reality.
We assume there's onlyone knowledge we share. On reality, one knowledge.
Knowledge is neatly organized, like the way we organize things like laundry. Putting it in piles of things that make sense to us.
One of the consequences of this, is as with physical things, we assume that in a perfect knowledge structure that everything will have its place.
Because we doing these knowledge structures, we need experts to do it. "We need experts - it's tough to do this."
The experts are going to have a lot of power who help us what's the right knowledge, what's the best knowledge.
Dewey: creating a map of knowledge like a map of the local landscape. This ultra rationalism of his forces some constraints: English is put somewhere else than Latin or German or Portuguese or Ural-Altaic or Dravidian, while southeast Asian languages "don't even get an integer."
Religion: 88 dewey decimals assigned to Christianity, jews get one, Buddhists and muslims one, etc.
The point is, is that this is NOT a solvable problem. There is not one world so there is not one knowledge.
But digitizing changes everything a whole bunch.
First order: organizing physical things themselves, like photo archives with pencil metadata written on back
Second order: physically separating metadata from the physical objects themselves, like a card catalog representing the knowledge of books
Third order: everything is digital, both objects and metadata. So what can you do now?
Photographic equipment: One thing usually goes into one pile; now you can sort digital cameras in as many places on an e-commerce website as you want.
Messiness is a virtue: hyperlinks can be as messy as you want. If you can't even count them or follow them all, then you've succeeded.
Unknown order. Most of Macy's is noise: stuff that doesn't fit you. Imagine getting a wheelbarrow that pulls out everything you can use, you've got your own personal store. The owner of info no longer owns the organization of information.
Go to a website shopping for digital cameras and sort the search based on your parameters, not theirs. That's an enormous release of power, a transfer of power.
Users are contributors. Social labeling: allowing the public to contribute meaning to information, like labeling online photos
Externalized thought. Cites Andy Clark: human beings have always externalized thought, like a physicist requiring a white board in order to think. Now we're doing the same thing with google. How can you get your kids to memorize the state capitals when they can look it up easily?
If our scaffolding now is bits, what does that mean?
Wikipedia: wiki is not paper. It's obvious, but it's a good thing to keep in mind. It's size is infinite; it's not limited.
What's the size of a topic? According to Brittanica, you can only have 32 volumes of knowledge, not 33 - that'd break your back. Artificial constraints to what is considered shared knowledge.
Snip the paper chain, the connection to reality, and build an encyclopedia out of bits, and watch what happens. You get entries like Deep Fried Mars Bar and the Heavy Metal Umlaut. These are somewhat frivolous, perhaps, but we know the size of these topics, and shows what matters to us as a culture, as humans and individuals. This is much closer to the passion of knowledge than what brittanica is.
Linnaeus library: you had to physically have the species to make it official. It's a map of all species. Linnaeus created a stack of 3x5 cards, laid them out, then made physical maps of them. This makes it tempting to lump things in one category to make life easier.
We have a container model of the mind. It's an insane idea. We're doing an internal representation of the world based on what we can store in our heads, or in a book, but they're both finite.
He then shows Doc Searls' blog: one of 11 million known and tracked blogs, though I'd guess there are at least double that. Shows his blogroll - all the links he shows to others. Lots of entries, lots of links. Blogs get represented as people writing publicly; but they're really people in conversations linking to each other. Goes against commercial website philosophy of not linking to outside sources. When you put it all together you get a stinkin' pile of generosity.
The NY Times: lots of news, lots of links. Except all but for point internally, the rest point to ads. And they have the nerve to call the blogosphere an echo chamber.
Why should you believe Doc Searls? You shouldn't necessarily, but you should believe the world he lives in more than the NY Times' world.
Objectivity: the world that is
Subjectivity: the world that matters
Multisubjectivity: it's not just lots of viewpoints; it's that you get viewpoints in conversation with each other.
If you want to learn about open source, you won't find it in Brittanica; instead, go to Doc's site and follow the links. Go to technorati and see what bloggers are saying. An endless set of links of people conversing with each other. And with all of those people, you'll get a better sense of what the truth is than reading a single source.
Multi-dispute-ism: when you get into an argument in public, you get hyper rational and try to tear the other person a new one, getting them to admit they're wrong and you're right. On the Web, it's more typical you get a dialogue. It's a big web - there's lots of room to disagree and move on. The conversation is never going to be resolved.
When you want a beer, you don't look for a perfect beer, just a good one. With information gatekeepers, they want knowledge to be perfect, rather than just good enough. With good enough, we barely need gatekeepers. It's pragmatic: we want the beer. "Pragmatic, local and damn refreshing."
Knowledge in the age of connected abundance. The solution to the over-abundance of information is more information. Connected abundance. Should we shove content into our kids' heads? Should we test them as individuals even though they learn socially? Should we imply ambiguity is a failure? Should we insist on being right?
Knowledge is an unending conversation. I mean this absolutely literally. It's not content that we all decide on. It's the engagement in the conversation. So we need to understand the context of knowledge - it depends on the discipline. We need to learn how to listen, seek ambiguity. If they're being too precise, we need to muddy the waters. And we need to love the difference in things.
Conversation, by its very nature, is a paradox. We base differences on identifying what's common. The simple act of a conversation is miraculous.
Posted by acarvin at June 28, 2005 9:21 AM
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