If you ask David Weinberger about the future of knowledge he'll quip, "I don't know," but if you press him to speak at length on the subject, he'll wax philosophically.
David Weinberger - Robin Smith Rose
"Knowledge is ailing, knowledge is in trouble. Wisdom doesn't just emerge out of all this knowledge," said Weinberger, a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. His books explore the impact of the Web on business and culture.
Weinberger delivered the keynote address at the 23rd Annual Federal Library and Information Center Committee Forum on Federal Information Policies, held at the Library on March 23. The theme of this year's forum was "A Digital Discourse: How Will Our World Look Digitized?"
According to Weinberger, knowledge is ailing because, in a computer-based society, its properties have been stripped down to pieces of data that can be processed.
"Wisdom has, traditionally, guided knowledge," said Weinberger. "But [today] knowledge has been reduced to bits of data that can populate a table. Data exists for computers, but can [data] ever go back to knowledge?"
Weinberger is doubtful. But he does believe that knowledge is a reflection of the "real world" and has the same properties and characteristics of the real world. He listed some: Knowledge is the meeting of minds about an object, for example, a fruit on a tree. Knowledge is the same for everyone; hence, there is "one knowledge"—a fact. Knowledge is impersonal or independent of the person who speaks of it, and knowledge is bigger than any one person because it is passed down from one generation to another. Knowledge is orderly, meaning it can be arranged into categories, such as many species of birds.
Weinberger explained the evolution of organizing information. In the first order, items themselves were arranged physically on a shelf according to some schema. In the second order, data was created to describe the items, but the items and descriptive data were separated; for example, a card catalog in a reading room described items on a shelf in the stacks. In the third order, the digital world, the information items and descriptions are linked by a computer, which makes the connections easy and immediate. "You can do easily in the digital world what the real world makes really hard," he said.
"Some connections are bogus, and some are brilliant," he added.
This move to the third order of knowledge has had a profound effect on the properties of knowledge, he said. In the digital world, knowledge is not the same for everyone. It is not impersonal, but it is relative and filtered through various groups with differing opinions that can be posted on Web logs (blogs) and discussed in "chat rooms."
Although many people get their information (facts) only from sources whose opinions they trust, such as the Encyclopedia Britannica, others use the Wikipedia, a Web site that allows everyone to become an authority and to post information.
"Everyone is an editor, and can [become one] anonymously," said Weinberger.
The Wikipedia site has a disclaimer noting that various articles need editing or fact-checking. "You'd never see that in The New York Times," said Weinberger, who praised Wikipedia for its honesty in lieu of authority.
Weinberger used the image of a tree to illustrate how, in the real world, knowledge about animals can be divided neatly into categories of species, with branches and leaves used to illustrate subcategories. All seemingly extraneous information is excluded. But in the digital world, a huge pile of multicolored leaves, each containing information, can be linked or "tagged" in various ways.
"Inclusion, not exclusion, is valued," said Weinberger. "The more links, the better."
Noting the ease with which information can be organized and reorganized in the digital world, Weinberger noted that a store owner would not appreciate a customer going through an entire store and making a large pile of clothes only in one size. But in the digital world, users can tag information and organize it in a way that works for them. Moreover, users can share their tags on public Web sites such as delicious.com.
"You can turn on your computer and get a feed each day of a remarkable amount of content. It's like having the world do your research for you."
It is Weinberger's hope that by continuing to invent ways of tagging the "leaves" and organizing them, users will find meaning.
"Knowledge isn't necessarily the highest function. We're not going to go from knowledge to wisdom automatically, but by building this infrastructure of meaning together, bottom up and top down."
