Small Pieces Loosely Reviewed

Recently I read Small Pieces Loosely Joined, a unified theory of the web, by David Weinberger. This by way of preparation for the Blogtalk conference in Vienna, May 23rd-24th, where David Weinberger will be a key-note speaker.

It is a well written, easy to read book, and that is where I at first got off on the wrong foot. The conversational tone of Davids book is not what I traditionally expect of serious reading, which Small Pieces is. But that, in the end says more about me, and about the environment I was taught in (what's difficult is serious, what's fun can't be worth much), than about the content of Davids book. In fact it's one of the points David wants to make, I think. (see the paragraph on knowledge further down)
Small Pieces Loosely Joined sets out to chart the Web as a New World, which brings with it the need to rethink our concepts of Space, Time, Perfection, Togetherness, Knowledge, Matter and Hope, to see how these concepts might work out different between the Web and the physical world of our everyday surroundings. No technology in this book? No, of course wires, chips, condensators, coils, are the infrastructure the web is build on, but that's not what takes place within it.
The Web is a world we've made for one another. It can be understood only within a web of ideas that includes our culture's foundational thoughts, with human spirit lingering at every joining point. That's philosophy, not technology, and rightly so.

Central observations in this book are:
We experience the web as a world, a space, we can travel around in. That's because we've come to confuse Measured Space (the 3d grid we have laid upon the universe to specify locations) and Lived Space, the places we live in with the things that surround us with the emotions, associations and memories that are attached to them. On the Web there is no space at all, but it's full of places, which makes us experience it as a space. Nearness on the Web is created by interest; if something is interesting it will be linked to.

Time we generally perceive as a string of beads, when a moment has passed it is gone forever. On the Web past moments (messages etc.) turn into places, and become part of the Web-world. Also different timelines, different stories, we can leave and come back to when we wish. All these timelines intertwined become part of the one timeline that is my life. Perfection is not something for the Web, except in places like on-line stores where we expect the information to be accurate and the functionality to be flawless. The Web celebrates our imperfection, which is a basic trait of humanity.(p.94)

Togetherness. The web is a new social and public place. We form groups there based on our interests that aren't unique. In the physical world however, when groups swell to masses we become faceless, our individuality becomes invisible within the mass. Not so on the web, there we retain our individual recognizability within the multitude. (p.120)

Knowledge has become too boney says David. Defining knowledge the traditional way as true statements we are justified believing, is like explaining sex without saying it feels good. (p.142) Boney knowledge is context-free and universal, whereas the Web adds context and locality again, putting meat and fat on the bones. It's a plea for knowledge as storytelling basically, and as a knowledge manager I recognize the value in that. However by denouncing 'boney' knowledge as reductionist David in my opinion goes of the track a bit. He uses a whole expose on thought experiments concerning artificial intelligence to show how 'boney' knowledge wants us to perceive our brain as a mere algorithm, and contrasting it with the full range of experiences we have. I don't know if David read Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel C. Dennett, but maybe it would help him appreciate the fact that reductionism in itself helps greatly in understanding how we came about. It's 'greedy reductionism' (the phrase is Dennett's) that is to be denounced. But reductionism in itself does not take away from the wonder of our full range of experiences, of feeling alive. It merely aims to provide a non-miracular explanation of how that came about. Greedy reductionism tries to do away with enjoying the wonder of the results as well.

Matter We have become used to favouring the physical over the mental. We understand our mental processes somehow as representations of the outside world in our brain. Thus we say things like what we call 'fear' is really just the release of powerful chemicals in our bloodstream. How about saying the release of powerful chemicals into our bloodstream is really just 'fear'? (p. 154) The former is a picture of us locked into our heads, but we actually live in the midst of friends and family. Our passions and feelings are part of us discovering the world and assigning meaning to it. In the same way knowledge is made boney, the emphasis on matter versus mental takes our human contextuality out of the equation. The Web puts that back. The Web is all things considered unreal, bits don't exist yet they convey information. It's the connections, the links, that make the web what it is. Thus with our lives: it's the people we live with, what we share, that makes live 'real' to us.

Hope The Web has been heralded as a revolution several times over. But after the dot com bust we could also say that nothing has changed much with the advent of the web. However the Web is not about revolution, but about evolution (and that's why I think David should not have done away with reductionism so easily). The idea of it will have its deepest effect, not it's current state or form. The Web is set to change and challenge some of the basic cultural default believes we hold, and will do so gradually, or better we will do it ourselves as the citizens of this new world the Web is. We will bind it to our physical world and existence in a myriad of ways, and will try to translate the things we think useful or special on the Web into parts of the physical worlds, and vice versa. It will take time, this journey to make our Web what we want it to be, and the journey will reshape us; the paradox of life itself. This blog is merely one little face in the mass adding to it.

I'd say read it, this conversational book of philosophy! And the universal theory of the web? Oops, haven't mentioned it, now did I? Must be because it's not there, that one place that expresses our knowledge for all time and perfectly states what ultimately matters to all of us together. If you pick up the book hoping for the One Final Answer, that will be hope in vain. But on the other hand, the book will explain exactly why that is: the Web's about humanity. So pick it up anyway.

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(posted by Ton Zijlstra at April 28, 2003 05:16 PM)