Dec 3, 2011

New York Times Blog Responds to I School Distinguished Lecture

From The New York Times

How the Internet Is Ruining Everything

By Quentin Hardy

The ongoing argument about whether the Internet is a boon or a bust to civilization usually centers on the Web’s abundance. With so much data and so many voices, we each have knowledge formerly hard-won by decades of specialization....

David Weinberger, one of the earliest and most perceptive analysts of the Internet, thinks we are looking at the wrong thing. It is not the content itself, but the structure of the Internet, that is the important thing. At least, as far as the destruction of a millennia-long human project is concerned....

Mr. Weinberger’s new book, called “Too Big to Know,” will be published in January. He gave a lecture with the same name last Wednesday at the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Information, touching on the book’s main themes. Chief among them was the destruction of our institutions of knowledge and culture.

“Newspapers, encyclopedias, they are just gone, at the touch of a hyperlink,” Mr. Weinberger said. The institutions of “education and politics – they’ll just shatter. How did they get to be so fragile?” With the pained glee of a scientist discovering very bad news, he added, “knowledge for my generation was at the center of the human quest. It is going the way of the recording industry. It is a term that won’t survive the generation.”

The abundance problem of the Web, Mr. Weinberger said, is really an old one. The Roman philosopher Seneca talked about “too many books” (echoing Ecclesiastes 12:12, “of making many books there is no end.”) The issue nowadays is to some extent the need for good filters, pushing away information after centuries of seeking it....

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Last updated:

October 4, 2016