David Weinberger at Burda’s DLD in Munich says knowledge, as we’ve traditionally known or referred to it, is singlar, binary, simple, scarce, and settled. Those properties of knowledge, he says, are, not by accident, are also the properties of the book. We think with our things. Knowledge, in short, was atoms. So now, we’re digitizing and connecting in an age of abundance. There’s an abundance of good and of crap but, he says, we’re much better at dealing with the abundance of crap. Yes, we filter it, kill it. David says that when there’s an abundance of good, our institutions are not built for it. “Control does not scale,” he says, “except at tremendous human costs.” Damn, he’s good at setting down the clear law. Control does not scale. Next: “The mess is essential.” The mess is the better reflection of who we are. In the era of scarcity, knowledge is limited in the book but online links and the ethic of the link are the means of generosity with abundance.
[...] La riflessione del lunedì mattina di David Weinberger (via Jeff Jarvis). [...]
“The mess is the better reflection of who we are”. Actually the mess is a much better reflection of where we live. How we manage and navigate through the mess is who we are.
That’s why it’s still very cool to read books, in between linking. Much too hard to do compare and contrast on the screen. It’s much easier when you can have it in Print.
The screen is good. The Cloud is good. Print is good. It’s all good. The only problem is when you think one is gooder than the other two.
Yes, “The mess is essential.” It’s clear that David Weinberger “gets” the inherently self-regulating nature of knowledge – specifically in the context of conversations – in social media. I seek to address this very issue in the most recent post on my own blog, Can there ever be ‘Too Many Notes?” http://tr.im/toomanynotes
Just because there’s petabytes of stuff out there that may not be of interest to you or me at any given point in time, it’s of interest to somebody, somewhere. It’s all about the agora of ideas – It’s a messy marketplace, but with that mess comes “generosity with abundance.”
Knowledge is just information which has context in a given situation to a given person. The problem isn’t just the abundance, it’s the inability for most people actually see application of great ideas in their own world.
“Control doesn’t scale” – this is absolutely true. And up to this point in society, control was maintained by the producer of information. “Information is Power”. This makes it very difficult for anyone to gain access to the information that may help them generate knowledge and move forward. But in the Information Age that we live in, with everyone seeking contextual answers to generate knowledge from, we must shift control from producer to consumer. Power will no longer be derived from the ownership of information, but will be derived by the volume of consumers that use your information in context of their own lives.
The mantra will move from the, “Information is Power” to “Being the Source of Information is Power”.
Wrong?: knowledge is singular, binary. [digital is singular, binary; knowledge is fuzzy, dreamlike, holographic]
Interesting: institutions can’t control the growing abundance of knowledge because control doesn’t scale. [Seems like a version of Shirky's Birthday Paradox: Interconnects grow faster than players.]
Batesonesque/Prigogenesque: “The mess is essential.” [Bateson's ode to entropy; Prigogene's ode to chaos theory.]
Thanks. More coming on Weinberger?
“There’s an abundance of good and of crap but, he says, we’re much better at dealing with the abundance of crap. Yes, we filter it, kill it. David says that when there’s an abundance of good, our institutions are not built for it.”
Can anyone clarify the above for me, I honestly don’t get this. The only difference I see between crap knowledge and good knowledge is the fact that you can toss the first out the window and you need to store the latter in your brain. Hence the problem of dealing with an abundance of good. Or am I completely missing the point?
I understand the rest of what Weinberger is saying, but where is he going with this? what is he really trying to say? control does not scale is common knowledge I assume. Look at any army or dictatorial country and you can second the statement “except at tremendous human costs.” But what is his point behind the statement, and how does it relate to print and digital?
To me, the difference between print and the i-net, is that knowledge and experience about life, social skills, often ecapsulated in stories, can be found best in print/books. For factual information, the internet is best (by far). Printed encyclopedia’s have become pretty much redundant, novels haven’t. There is s slow shift with digital books and digital readers trying to physically replace the book, it’s not very appearant to me yet though. Time will tell.
[...] age. The world is messy and getting messier. Extolling the good is becoming more difficult. Jeff Jarvis: So now, we’re digitizing and connecting in an age of abundance. There’s an abundance of good [...]
“Control does not scale,”…. “except at tremendous human costs.”
This sentence must be engraved in gold. Yet, the history of commerce, finance, politics, militarism, and wars are in essence attempts by one group of human beings to control another. The “tremendous human costs” has not and will not be of much concern to powers, of any kind, who dictate the course of history. Our current financial fiasco, having taken place in parallel with and in spite of the “open” systems revolution of the last decade provides one great example of “new” phenomenon such as Google having almost zero impact on preventing controlling powers from corrupting the masses’ lives.
Israel’s repeated massacres of defenceless Palestinians ever since and even before its creation, and the very recent intentional mass killings of women and children in Gaza in particular, provide the best example of state machinery attempts at “scaling” control “at tremendous human cost”. We are a long long way away and far from learning the lessons of openness and democratic behavior. Except, of course, when we can use that openness to exert more control and make more money.