Saturday, December 10, 2011

Nonfiction Review: 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 by David Weinberger. Basic, $27.50 (256p) ISBN 978-0-465-02142-0

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."


Nonfiction Review: 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 by David Weinberger. Basic, $27.50 (256p) ISBN 978-0-465-02142-0

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