“The fiction writer and activist Cory Doctorow, among others, has succeeded commercially, as well as in the impact of his ideas, by giving away online access to his books even as he sells paper copies.” – p. 109 I read Little Brother a couple years ago, so whenever Doctorow’s name is mentioned, my ears perk up. … Continue reading No such thing as free information?
‘The result of the new filtering in the front is an increasingly smart network, with more hooks and ties by which we can find our way through it and make sense of what we find.’ –David Weinberger The innovation of digital information storage and access has changed the way we understand the body of knowledge … Continue reading How Knowledge is Accessed on the Internet by Thuso Motselebane
We should be able to start at A and reason our way to Z, in careful, measured steps. This long-form argument is what we’ve taken to be human reasoning at its best. So, what if the Internet is shortening our attention spans? Suppose we can no longer get from A to B without being distracted … Continue reading Long-form, Attention, and Darwin
In David Weinberger’s, Too Big to Know, beginning on page 44 he states: We are losing knowledge’s body: a comprehensible, masterable collection of ideas and works that together reflect the truth about the world. In field after field we’ve witnessed the idea of a “canon” falling. The idea that there is such a thing as … Continue reading The internet as a body of knowledge.
“We are witnessing a version of Newton’s Second Law: On the Net, every fact has an equal and opposite reaction. Those reactive facts may be dead wrong. Indeed, when facts truly contradict, at least one of them has to be wrong. But this continuous, multi-sided, linked contradiction of every fact changes the nature and role … Continue reading Every Fact Has an Equal and Opposite Reaction
” We don’t have to choose between them. Both have value. The Circle is a lump of qualified, sober experts. The Facebook page is a big, throbbing lump of people who want to talk about Heidegger for whatever reason. The two together form a loosely connected network of people who care about Heidegger. The participants … Continue reading Education
Knowledge is taking on the shape of the Net—that is, the Internet. Of all the different communication networks we’ve built for ourselves, with all their many shapes—the history of communication networks includes rings, hubs-and-spokes, stars, and more—the Net is the messiest. That gives it a crucial feature: It works at every scale. … Of course, … Continue reading Post 1
In short, Expert Labs is a conscious response to the fact that knowledge has rapidly gotten too big for its old container… Especially containers that are shaped like pyramids. The idea that you could gather data and information and then extract value from them by reducing them with every step upward now seems overly controlled … Continue reading The DIKW Pyramid and the Role of Forward Filtering
“And the fear that keeps us awake at night is not that all this information will cause us to have a mental breakdown, but that we are not getting enough of the information we need” (Weinberger 9). In Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock (1970), the encounter of information overload would induce varying levels of anxieties. … Continue reading Rethinking the Value of Information
The Internet represents the ascension of yahoos, a victory lap for plagiarists, the end of culture, the beginning of the dark ages inhabited by glassy-eyed chronic masturbators who judge truth by the number of thumbs up, wisdom by the number of views, and knowledge by whatever is most fun to believe … Our task is … Continue reading Building Smart Rooms and Not The End of Culture
“Filters no longer filter out. They filter forward, bringing their results to the front. What doesn’t make it through a filter is still visible and available in the background.” While reading and coming across this observation that the author makes, I couldn’t help but to think how true this statement resonates in regards of how … Continue reading Blog Post #1
Page 116 ‘Long-form writing is often a better instrument of understanding when it is embedded in a web of ideas, conversations, and arguments, all linked and traversable. The writings of Charles Darwin, Nicholas Carr, and Jay Rosen are more useful, understandable, verifiable, and up to date because of the links that point into them and … Continue reading Too Big to Know: 1st post
Back before Ackoff’s pyramid, back when the idea of knowledge first occurred to us, the ability to know our world was the essential difference between us and the other animals. It was our fulfillment as humans, our destiny. Knowledge itself fit together into a perfectly ordered whole. Knowledge therefore was considered for thousands of years … Continue reading Knowledge
According to James, Surowiecki, there are “precise conditions under which crowds do better than experts — it depends on there being a diversity of opinion, independence, decentralization, and a way to derive a collective decision — but almost as soon as he published it, “the wisdom of crowds” was used to refer to everything from … Continue reading Crowds good? . . . Yes, so long as, and then . . .
“There were certainly facts before the start of the nineteenth century; it was a fact that the ocean was salty even before humans first tasted it, and it was a fact that polio is caused by a virus even before we had discovered viruses. But only recently have facts emerged as the general foundation of knowledge and the … Continue reading Thoughts on David Weinberger’s Too Big To Know
“In the remainder of this book we will follow a train of thought that begins with the hypothesis—for which there is increasing evidence—that in a networked world, knowledge lives not in books or in heads but in the network itself. It’s not that the network is a super-brain or is going to become conscious. It’s … Continue reading The book, the screen, or both?
“At last thought has a medium that helps it past the limitations of physical books that brought us to think of long-form thought as the highest and most natural shape knowledge could assume.” (pp.96) I am not an expert on authorship, readership, or book history, nor have I sufficiently read or am familiar with David … Continue reading Re: Book Shaped Thought
The smartest person in the room is not the person standing at the front lecturing us, and it is not the collective wisdom of those in the room. The smartest person in the room is the room itself: the network that joins people and ideas in the room, and connects to those outside of it.” … Continue reading Comments on “Too Big To Know” by Benjamin Ignac
As we end our fourth class meeting on January 22nd, we are nearing the end of the first two weeks of this introduction to digital humanities: that is, we have been in the introduction of an introduction. So what does it mean to get started — or to get started with getting started? We’ve actually already traversed a number of different entry points as we push off from land into the yet-to-be-mapped regions where — maybe? — “there be [digital?] dragons.” The New York Times’ 2010/2011 “Humanities 2.0” series by Patricia Cohen offered examples of what kinds of projects and…
