>>Presenter: Okay.
Welcome, everyone.
It's my pleasure to welcome you here today
to our Authors at Google series.
Welcome to everyone here in person, and everyone
on webcast as well.
I'm Bradley Horowitz, head of Product for
Google+.
It's my pleasure to introduce David Weinberger.
David has one of those resumes and CVs that
just goes on and on.
I'm going to pluck out a few highlights so
you know-- to remind you why you're here.
He's the co-author of the bestseller the Cluetrain
Manifesto, which Information Week called the
most important business book since Tom Peters'
In Search of Excellence.
He's also the author of Small Pieces Loosely
Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web, and the
author of Everything is Miscellaneous: The
Power of the New Digital Disorder.
You have a knack, sir, for titling your books.
I think these are wonderful and intriguing.
He's also a senior researcher at Harvard's
Berkman Center for Law.
He's the co-director of the Harvard Library
Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School and is
a Franklin fellow at the United States State
Department.
He's a frequent advisor, commentator on NPR
and other news organizations.
He wrote gags for Woody Allen's comic strip
for seven years.
He notes that this raises expectations he
will not meet in the talk you're about to
hear.
[laughs] He has a Ph.
D. in philosophy from the University of Toronto
and taught philosophy for six years.
And on and on.
The way that I think about David's work is
to think about the parallel to athletics.
There are some people who are just blessed.
They're born six foot one and can throw a
100 mile an hour fastball.
When you pair these people with someone who's
an expert in biomechanics and can actually
teach them about fast twitch muscle fibers
and air resistance and things like that, it
will take the already good and make them great.
All of us here at Google, you're exceptional.
You're here because you're the best at what
you do.
We train each other and become steeped in
our Googley principles.
Then great things happen.
The way I think of David's work: he's part
sociologist, part anthropologist, part social
psychologist, economics-- what else?-- journalist.
All of this is mixed in.
What he does is he holds up a mirror to the
work that we're doing.
He helps us better understand ourselves.
He frames it in ways that are valuable in
understanding our own work.
That's my experience, always, when I read
his books.
I end up with a better appreciation for my
own work.
Things that I did and took for granted are
not reframed in ways that I can better understand
myself.
I really encourage you all to read his works,
to pay attention today.
Without further ado, I want to welcome to
the stage David Weinberger.
[applause]
>>David Weinberger: What a great introduction,
which I can't live up to.
Thank you very much.
It's especially delightful to me to have this
coming from you, Bradley, where we haven't
seen each other in a few years.
In the five minutes we had coming up here,
we already had a conversation that changed
my mind about a couple of things.
[laughs] Typical of Google and of Bradley.
I do want to talk about the topics in this
book.
In particular, a question that I think has
become pretty pressing, which is this bizarre
phenomenon, unexpected phenomenon, that the
most important pillars of our culture, especially
when it comes to knowledge, have started to
just fall over, fall apart.
Whether it's encyclopedias--.
Encyclopedias, besides being an actual collection
of knowledge, were, for many years, the sign
of your home's commitment to knowledge, if
you had the encyclopedia in your house.
And suddenly, it's just gone!
They're not gone, but you know what I mean.
As a cultural reference.
Newspapers: obviously also getting aggregated
and getting reaggregated.
Libraries, which are very much--.
Every librarian is wondering, "What's going
to happen to libraries?"
And nobody knows.
We just don't know.
This core institution in our culture, of knowledge.
We don't know what's going to happen.
It's pretty amazing to be living in these
times.
These changes have occurred because of what,
in some sense, is a really small technology:
because of hyperlinks.
Little hyperlinks.
This little bit of code, --granted, embedded
into much a bigger system, but nevertheless--
this little bit of technology just pings against
these mighty institutions of knowledge, and
the institutions fall over.
This is unexpected, and it's certainly worth
asking, "Why?"
I am not going to be able to answer that question,
but I want to talk about it in terms of--.
In particular, knowledge as an institution,
which is a peculiarly important, it is a key
institution, knowledge is, in our culture.
I'm only talking about the West and western
knowledge, by the way.
In large part because--.
If you look at this quote from Senator Daniel
Moynihan, it's a quote that's coming up more
and more these days.
It makes a certain promise.
This is the promise of knowledge in the West
for the past 2500 years: "Everyone is entitled
to his own opinion, not his own facts."
That's a very cool expression, really nicely
put.
I think we respond to it, these days, because
it offers some comfort, some very traditional
comfort, that "Yes, we all disagree and there
are fights all over the place, but if we could
just sit down and focus on the facts, then
we can come to agreement.
We can live together in agreement."
That has been the promise of knowledge from
the beginning, from the Greek beginnings 2500
years ago.
That we will be able, that knowledge will
enable us, to live together across our differences.
Really quick trip through what knowledge was.
You know all of this.
We thought about knowledge as a picture of
the world that we build up point by point,
brick by brick.
We do this across generations.
If you work hard, you might be able to contribute
a brick or two to this picture of the world
that we've been creating.
This is a picture in which each piece is nailed
down.
We're nailing down stuff.
I know I'm mixing metaphors like crazy, but--.
Finally, we're able to do this because in
the great rush of sensation or the great mix
of mere opinion, which is where the concept
of knowledge originally began with the Greeks:
so many opinions you have to figure out which
ones are worth holding on to, which ones are
true and worthy of belief.
We're able to do this because we go through
these streams and we pan for gold.
Yes, four metaphors in under a minute.
That knowledge is relatively scarce, that
most of what we see is not knowledge.
It's wrong.
It's illusion, it's opinion, it's mere sensation.
Knowledge is the real stuff that we are able
to filter out.
That's been the project of knowledge in our
culture.
From the beginning, it has recognized and
tried to deal with the fact that the world
is obviously way, way, way, way bigger than
what can fit into anybody's skulls.
The Greeks knew this.
We know this all the way through our history.
The world is much bigger.
Our knowledge gets much bigger.
Our skulls don't get much bigger.
That's a real problem.
How do we small creatures know the world?
We adopted, in the West, a particular strategy,
which is, to put this crudely, to reduce what
there is to know so that our brains can manage
it.
Our brains collectively can manage it.
One of the more prominent techniques has been
to break off brain-sized chunks of the world
and to allow somebody to master that chunk,
to dominate that chunk, and become an expert.
Then we can go to the expert when we have
a question, or go to the expert's book, and
we can ask the expert a question.
We can get an answer and we can move on because
it's been answered.
This is a hugely--.
And if we were not sure if we trust the expert,
then we can look up her or his credentials
and move on.
"Oh, I didn't know you have a degree from
wherever."
This works.
This system absolutely works.
It's made us the dominant species on the planet.
It's incredibly efficient.
But it is primarily constructed as a system
of stopping points.
You've asked the expert, and the efficiency
of the system is, assuming the credential
is acceptable, you don't have to ask any more.
You got your answer.
You can move on.
You don't have to repeat the experiment.
You don't have to go look at the primary research.
The expert told you.
You are right, generally, of course, to rely
upon genuine experts.
But this is a system about creating a set
of stopping points so that we can manage in
a world that is just way, way too big otherwise.
So it works.
It's a fantastic system.
It's an amazing system.
But it's not what knowledge is.
It's what knowledge is when its medium is
paper.
This is--.
[pause] Paper is itself a stopping point.
It's just the way that it is.
You can't click on the page and get to the
next source.
It has footnotes, you're in a book and you're
reading and there's a footnote.
So there are obviously connections out to
the world.
We know books are written by people who are
deeply involved in social networks.
All that's true.
But the book itself, as the medium of knowledge,
is a hugely disconnected and disconnective
medium.
There's the footnote.
You don't pursue footnotes.
It's very rare that anybody actually uses
the footnote as a link, because it means getting
on a bus and going to the local library and
hoping that they'll have the work.
And they probably won't.
If they do, it's probably out.
Meanwhile, it's very expensive to get past
the disconnected nature of books.
So our idea of knowledge is actually, unsurprisingly,
it's completely a McLuhan thing.
It's unsurprisingly a reflection of the nature
of its medium.
Disconnected medium.
You have a book and you're an author.
You've got to try to put everything into the
book that the reader needs, because you know
the reader's not easily going to be able to
hop out of the book and continue.
We have a sense of knowledge that comes directly
from books, but it's not knowledge in itself.
It's not knowledge's own nature.
It's what knowledge looks like in books.
But now, of course, we have this different
medium.
It's hugely, hugely connected.
You can think about links as being a new type
of punctuation.
The old type tells you where to stop, links
tell you how to continue, and provide you
the means.
The smallest possible click of the human finger,
and you've now done the thing that otherwise
requires books and old card catalogues in
the old days, and crawling through shelves.
We have a hugely connected medium, which is
fantastic, obviously.
But there are also issues.
So my hypothesis is that knowledge is taking,
just as it took on the properties of its old
medium, it's now taking on properties of the
new medium.
I want to look at four of those properties.
The first is, obviously, it's too much.
The old paper-based medium: very restricted
in how much could be output or stored.
Now: no.
It's way, way too much stuff.
Clay Shirky said recently, and put it brilliantly,
as he tends to do-- oh, Clay-- that "There's
no such thing as information overload.
There's only filter failure."
Brilliant way of putting it.
He's trying to provide us with some comfort,
historical comfort, some historical continuity.
I think he's basically saying, "Don't freak
out.
We've always, in our history, have at times
felt overloaded by information, and we know
what to do about it.
We fix our filters."
I think he's absolutely right to give us this
sense of continuity, but I want to point to
two discontinuities, which I think Clay will
probably be okay with, but I'll let him speak
for himself.
I also want to-- Just a shout out to Ann Blair,
who makes the same point in a book that came
out six months before my book, which is Too
Big to Know.
Hers is called Too Much to Know.
Just one of those things.
Hers is a very scholarly and interesting look
at what happened to information in the age
of Gutenberg.
It's actually a little broader than that,
but it's looking very carefully at what information
overload actually was, and what the filters
were.
The term "information overload" itself came
to prominence through Alvin Toffler's book
Future Shock, 1970.
Very good book in which he models the term
on the prior term, which was "sensory overload."
He did not come up with the term.
Sensory overload is 1950s, the idea which
was that your senses get overwhelmed at a
Grateful Dead concert.
There's too many lights and sounds and music
and people pushing in on you.
That can cause your sensory circuits to blow
and you will fall down as a quivering mass
with your eyes rolled back in your head.
It was an individual psychological syndrome.
Same thing once we decided for whatever reason,
which I don't understand but actually am quite
interested in, that brains are information
processors, which let's not get started on.
But once you decided that, then of course
there has to be the equivalent thing, which
is information overload, with the same sort
of effect: too much information and you will
fall down and be a quivering mass, irrational
mass.
In fact, Toffler says that "Sanity itself
hangs upon avoiding information overload."
It's very much an individual symptom.
A problem that happens that strikes you as
an individual.
What did information overload look like in
1974?
Some marketers did some research, investigating,
in which they gave 192 housewives 16 brands,
each of which had 16 different categories
of information.
They discovered, these marketing researchers,
that with that much information, [pause] the
quality of the housewives' decisions went
down.
This was information overload: 16 brands,
16 categories.
The poor housewives had to be protected from
this much information, which was the conclusion.
"Therefore, we're doing the housewives a favor
by not taxing them with that much information."
But we look at this now, and this is like
a joke.
This is laughable.
That's what information overload is? 16 brands,
16 categories?
I mean-- Yes, that is what information overload
looked like.
It has gone, in the past, since 1970 when
the term came to prominence, from an problem
for an individual, that you will fall down
quivering, to simply being not only scaled
up, but just a feature of the environment.
It's not a complaint about an individual,
it's about our culture.
There's information overload.
When people complain about information overload,
they don't say, "Oh, I feel a seizure coming
on.
Somebody put a piece of wood between my teeth
so I don't swallow--."
They are, instead, really saying, "I want
more information.
I want the right information.
Get me more information.
Hurry, stat.
More information."
Our idea of information overload has shifted
very much.
It is a different concept than we have had
in the past.
[pause]
Second discontinuity in information overload
is that the nature of filters themselves have
changed.
You know, sure, there's filter failure.
But filters have changed.
In the physical world that we all are very
familiar with, when you filter something,
you filter the other stuff out.
If you are on the acquisitions committee of
your local library, you choose the new books.
They get put up on the nice shelf in the library.
New books.
Everybody's very happy when they go in and
they see that.
What people don't see is that a million books
are published every year.
They don't see the million minus a thousand,
whatever it is, stacked in the sad and lonely
trucks that are backing away, their hearts
broken, from the library loading bin.
You do not see that.
You only see what has been brought forward,
because that's how physical filters work.
You get rid of, you hide, you dispose of,
or never make available, the stuff that doesn't
make it through the filter.
The articles that get sent into the-- the
manuscripts that get sent to book publishers
that get rejected, you never see those.
They're filtered out.
On the web, obviously, we filter differently.
When I make my list of top ten science articles
of the week or whatever on my blog, all that
I'm doing is choosing ten and reducing the
number of clicks that it takes to get to them.
I'm not throwing anything out.
I'm not making anything invisible or hiding
anything or rejecting anything.
I'm just simply shortening the number of clicks.
All that material that didn't make my top
ten list is still there and will show up in
the next search that somebody does on some
search engine, for example.
Or it will get passed around in email.
Or will be in somebody's social network software.
Or whatever.
All that stuff is still there.
It's still available.
It may show up.
On the net, we don't filter out, we only filter
forward.
And furthermore, the search engines are very,
very eager to show us exactly how much is
there that they aren't showing us on the first
page.
We're now constantly aware of just how much
there is, something that was hidden from us
before.
We filter forward, we're now much more aware
of the overload.
And we seem absolutely fine with it.
In part because we don't have to reduce the
world by filtering out, we can enhance it
by filtering forward.
This leads to a new strategy that one sees
adopted all over the place, which is in general,
include everything.
If you're going to try--.
Rather than try to curate a collection, --and
there's tremendous value there, too, of course--
but rather than seeing this as the first alternative,
instead include everything.
The economics of deletion obviously have shifted
so that it's often more, it's cheaper to include
than to exclude.
The problem with building curated collections--
and as I work in a library, I do appreciate
the value of them-- but the problem with them,
with deciding what's going to be in, what's
going to be out, is that you can never do
that adequately.
You cannot anticipate what people are going
to be interested in because we're a crazy,
squirrelly species and there's no telling
what we're going to be interested in.
If you are curating a news collection and
you decided to keep out of it all the gossipy,
trashy stuff about celebrities, Lindsay Lohan
and all the rest of it, probably a good decision
in one sense.
A reasonable decision, in any case.
But you will have just deprived the set of
scholars of the primary materials, the source
materials they need in order to investigate
their topic, which, for example, is the effect
of media on women celebrities.
You will have completely killed this academic
conference about the same topic.
You don't know what's going to be interesting
or important to people.
Furthermore, you can't predict history.
Nobody could have predicted that the 1996
records of the library committee in Wasilla
was actually worth including in some curated
collection, because you could not predict
what was going to happen in 2008.
Nobody did.
So there are good reasons to try to include
everything where everything is an overstatement,
but you know what I mean.
If you do that, you have to give users ways
of filtering on the way out, according to
what they're interested in and how they think
about how the world is organized.
So much activity over the past 15 years.
You can track the history of the web by watching
the history of how we are learning to filter
large collections for ourselves and for one
another.
I'm at Google, I'm not going to-- You know
that.
Okay, next characteristic of the net that
I think knowledge is picking up is messiness.
We're really good at organizing things.
We've gotten incredibly good at doing it.
And not simply because we want to be able
to find things, though that would be enough.
But for most of our history in the past 2500
years, we believe that we are organizing things
not simply for finding but in order to discover
what they are.
To know what something was, in the West, has
been to know where it fits in the order.
The order of the universe.
If you're Aristotle, you're arranging things
by, --and in the West, we're basically all
Aristotle-- you're trying to figure out how
this is different from the other objects in
its class and how it's the same as--.
And you do this nested hierarchy.
To know what something is is to discover its
position in its hierarchy.
The order that God established.
That is our spiritual mission as well, at
least post-Greek.
Or it's to see the one logical order, which
is also beautiful, by the way.
The order, truth, and beauty, same thing.
The order is a thing of magnificent beauty,
and it was our task to discover it.
It wasn't simply a matter of finding.
Well, there's a reason why we thought this
way.
I believe it has a lot to do with the fact
that the physical world does work in that
way.
That is, when you and your spouse are trying
to figure out how to organize the CDs in your
collection, and you want to do it alphabetically
and your spouse wants to do it by genre or
whatever, only one of you can win.
Because in the physical world, everything
does have to be in one and only one spot.
You can't have two things in the same spot.
Atoms.
We've dealt with it.
We've taken that limitation and we've imported
it into the world of ideas so that we have
the idea that the order of the universe--.
Also everything has a single spot and there's
only one right order.
In arranging our physical stuff, somebody
had to decide whether Philly Wacko here, who's
playing cracked avant folk while ranting against
the-- can't read it-- oh, the Broads, who
wronged him, whether that's actually under
British psych or whether that should be under
acid, visionaries, and weirdos.
I'm sure there's a very intense argument about
this.
But somebody had to win.
Whereas obviously, digitally, it's a digital
collection: "Well, I'll just make playlists.
We'll have as many as we want, overlaying
them.
We don't have to argue about it anymore."
Each of these actually exposes some meaning.
Now, to think that there is a single order
that says what a bird really is and that it's
worth our time to argue over that, to do that
in a hyperlinked world, a tabbed world, the
multiclassification and playlisted world?
It now seems ridiculous!
It's not an argument we're interested in having
anymore.
It just seems [pause] pointless to think there's
got to be one order of the universe.
We have this idea that dominated our culture
for millennia, has dropped away.
If I say to you, "And there is a single order
of the universe, of course", this thing that
was not only taken for granted but was taken
as human destiny departs.
It now seems to you like I'm a crazy guy.
There is a very large change.
It actually, I think, overall is a wonderful
change, because it turns out that messiness
is how you scale meaning.
Multiple playlists, multiple tabs, all piled
up on top one another.
Each one of them has some meaning.
It has some information to contribute.
This is how you scale meaning.
That's what we're doing now.
Okay, unsettled.
[pause] Back to Moynihan.
Remember this idea that we'll all just focus
on the facts and agree and sit down, preferably
over coffee--.
The coffee house ideal from the Enlightenment,
very powerful image.
Sit down, we have a rational conversation.
We can figure this out and we can agree because
there are facts.
Of course there are facts.
But then you go out on the web and every link
expresses some difference between the page
that you're on and the one that you're being
sent to.
Here's a page that expands on what I said
or disagrees or it's funny.
You say, "Why are you sending somebody to
that place?"
That's where the value of the web is.
Take absurd cases.
If every page was exactly the same, the web
would have negative value.
It's only because it's this web of difference
that the web has value.
It's not just difference, it's linked difference,
which is an amazing development that we not
only have a moment in our history where we're
able to see all the ways we disagree and enhance
one another, the ways that our points of view
are different, those points of view are now
linked.
Those of you who are fans of Hegel, this is
a wonderful Hegelian moment where [pause]
it's-- yeah.
Here we have these differences that are in
conversation.
Sometimes quite literally in conversation.
This is very different than the picture of
the world that Moynihan paints for us and
that we've had as part of our Enlightenment
ideal.
It really bothers us.
I think there's truth in each of these worries,
each of these fears.
We should be taking them really seriously.
There is truth in them.
You go out on the web, and what you see is
all of this disagreement.
Well, I think what's actually happening is
that the net is exposing a truth that we've
always known in our hearts, but we couldn't
quite acknowledge.
We didn't have the environment which made
it possible to acknowledge it, which is, you
know what, we actually don't agree about anything.
We don't agree about anything!
There's nothing on the web that is--.
There's no fact uncontested on the web.
There are facts.
I like science, I like facts.
So I want to be really clear: there are facts.
Some statements are false, and there are people
who lie.
I totally believe that.
My point is is we're not going to agree about
who those people are.
We're just not.
It doesn't matter how many facts you bring
to bear.
Nope!
There's going to be continuous disagreement,
and there always will be.
My evidence for saying that is all of human
history, we've never agreed about anything.
Now, we can see that we don't.
It is evident before our faces.
One of the more-- . This is a problem.
One of the more hopeful things, though, is
that we have also been evolving rapidly ways
of dealing with difference and disagreement
that enable us to move forward and in fact
benefit from that disagreement.
This is actually a terrible example, but it's
a real example from a couple of days ago.
There's this YouTube site that famously has
long conversations.
They're not particularly well threaded conversations.
It doesn't seem to be what whoever-- Oh, I
see, sir, you seem have a YouTube sweatshirt
on.
You must have been to their offices at some
time.
Those conversational threads at YouTube serve
a different purpose.
They're not for long threaded conversations.
Here's the new Batman trailer.
4.5 million views.
From about three days ago, there's a thread
of about 30 back and forths about circumcision.
It's pretty learned.
[laughter] It gets a little nasty, but it's
pretty learned.
They're flinging facts back and forth and
so on.
It's a little hard to understand exactly how
this got started, and it doesn't matter.
The point is that in a different conversational
medium-- At YouTube, it doesn't matter because
it will just be pushed down, there's such
volume.
But in a different conversational medium,
there would be a way of forking conversations.
Forking is a really powerful tool that's hard
to do in the real world.
It's rude and disruptive to do it in the real
world.
But it's usually helpful in the online world
where people are going down, in a very heated
fashion, down some thread that has nothing
to do with the original thread.
A fork takes us somewhere--.
Continue it.
Anybody else who would like to continue arguing
about circumcision, please feel free to do
so.
We're not ending the conversation by any means,
just maybe not on the Batman site.
Because we want to talk about something else.
Forking is a really powerful tool for enabling
difference to continue without telling people,
"Shut up!" [laughter] which is what we would
do in the real world if that conversation
broke out.
The second technique that I think is amazingly
powerful for dealing, not only dealing with
difference but benefiting from it is namespaces.
In the 19th century, we spent an awful lot
of time trying to figure out whether that
thing is--.
First of all, is it really a mammal or what
is it?
And second of all, could it possibly even
exist?
Because it violated the classification schemes
that we had.
It didn't fit into our taxonomy.
There was very real thought that it must be
a hoax.
Even when one was delivered with eggs in it,
it was assumed it must be a hoax because such
a thing could not exist.
We spent a lot of time arguing about how to
classify this.
Now, we don't so much because, and other species
and genes as well because, for example, because
we can just set up a namespace.
Say, "Well, okay, I call it a platypus and
I think about it this way.
You call it a water mole.
That's fine, so long as I know that what I
call platypus, you call water mole and you
call this thing."
Namespaces are a wonderful way of dealing
with differences.
At Encyclopedia of Life, they in fact have
two servers.
One--.
If you're a scientist who wants some information,
you can use whatever nomenclature you want,
because they track them all, that they can
find.
It doesn't matter what you call it.
Call if what you want.
That's the least interesting thing about it,
what name you use for it.
You can put it within whatever taxonomy you
prefer.
That's not--.
And if two scientist want to talk about that
thing, even though they call them something
different and classify it differently, great.
You can do that because it's namespaces.
We can coordinate namespaces.
Another way that we are evolving very rapidly
to deal with difference and to benefit from
it is the linked data, which I'm not going
to explain because I'm at Google.
But it is, in fact, a way of letting people
release data very easily without having to
worry about getting it classified right in
the uniform way.
No, you do it in some reasonable way.
You point to disambiguating pages.
If somebody does the mapping right, you're
pointing to Encyclopedia of Life, I'm pointing
to the Tasmanian Field Guide, which I've made
up.
We want to know--.
If we want to enable computers to know that
we're all talking about the same thing, we
can do a mapping and say, "That page in Encyclopedia
of Life, that's really referring to the same
thing as that page in the Tasmanian Field
Guide."
It's a really good way of getting past differences
that don't matter so we can collaborate.
"Yay for difference!
Difference is wonderful, difference is great."
It is, but.
[pause]
This is what the net looks like a little bit.
As it is, this is what the net looks like
in terms of how we experience it.
We do seem to tend to want to hang out with
people who are like us.
There's reason to think that this is a human
thing, maybe even a genetic thing, maybe a
brain thing.
But we do it.
We like to be with people who are like us.
This is the echo chamber argument that you're
all familiar with.
I just want to spend one slide on the echo
chamber, because I think it's a real issue.
I am not nearly as convinced, as many others
are, that it is the killer issue that some
have claimed.
But I do think it's a real issue.
The problems with understanding it are--.
So I say one slide, but I've got lots of words
on this slide.
Sorry.
The problems are difficult and deep and, I
think, emblematic of a difference about how
we think about knowledge and conversation,
how knowledge is developed.
First of all, we don't have a lot of data
that tells us exactly how much, what the diversity
of sources are that we engage with.
That's more data.
Part of the problem is, compared to what?
We want to know if the net is making us more
open or not.
The echo chamber argument says, "It's easier
to hang out with people that you like."
Hanging out with--.
Excuse me.
"People who are like you", which turns out
to be often the same thing.
If you hang out with people who are like you
in their beliefs, then you end up reconfirming
your own beliefs and, in fact, becoming more
extreme in your beliefs.
If that's the case, the internet is making
us less open.
But the question is: compared to what?
Compared to pre-net, when we had, when I grew
up, three television channels and you had
a couple of newspapers.
The newspapers were this big and reported
a range of opinion that was actually even
smaller than that?
Compared to what?
We don't have a baseline.
And we have a romanticized view of what those
days were like.
"Back in the old days, we all read newspapers.
Newspapers were full of news."
Well, first of all, A: we didn't, B: we're
reading tabloids, which are full of crap,
and third of all, we don't know what people
were actually reading in a newspaper.
The New York Times is full of wonderful stories.
Most of us read it like this, looking for
a headline that catches our eye.
It's not like 15 years ago, we're all studiously
going through every article.
So it's really not clear what we're comparing
it to.
Clay Shirky points out that we may even have
the causality wrong.
The echo chamber theorists.
[indistinct] in particular.
That they may have the causality wrong.
That maybe, in fact, we are becoming more
polarized because we are in more contact with
people with whom we disagree.
That causes us to harden our opinions.
[pause] There are times in the day when I'm
totally an echo chamber guy.
If I'm going onto a site of a politician,
a candidate who I support, I want an echo
chamber.
I need an echo chamber, because that's how
political movements are formed.
If I'm going to a sports site.
I don't, but I can imagine.
If I went to a sports site, I don't want to
particularly maybe want to hear from everybody
who hates my team.
I'm from Boston, so I'll say the Yankees.
I don't necessarily want to go to a site where
the Red Sox fans and the Yankees fans are
always mixing it up.
I want to hang out with Red Sox fans.
It's baseball, right?
[laughter] It's not at all clear how this
varies by education level, if it's there at
all.
By education level, by socioeconomic class,
by topic, by time of day, and the rest of
it.
But for me, the two more important, when it
comes to knowledge, what's happening in knowledge,
the two more important points are the next.
The first is that the echo chamber argument,
in at least some of its forms, assumes that
the role, the only good conversation is one
where two people who really disagree can sit
down in the Moynihan sense, over some coffee
and a big bowl of facts.
They each say, "I disagree with you, my friend.
I'm a Jew, you're a Nazi.
I disagree with you.
But hey, I respect you.
I respect your opinions.
And I'm open.
Maybe you're right.
I'm open to being converted.
Let's sit down.
Maybe I'll become a Nazi and maybe you'll
become a Jew."
That's a good conversation.
That's a conversation that never happens.
Never ever.
Never happens.
I'm going to tell you I'm never going to sit
down with a Nazi with an open mind and think,
"Yeah.
That's a good point.
You make a good point there, Adolf."
Not going to happen.
It's not how conversation works, nor should
it be how conversation works, except under
very special circumstances.
And so to say, "Well, the web is not full
of these Jew meets Nazi conversations.
That's a failure of the web."
No, it's not.
It's a failure of expectation about humans
and conversation.
The same thing for--.
It seems to me that the echo chamber argument,
the people who are most worried about it have
a different idea about what conversation is
for.
Excuse me, how it works.
In order for two people to talk, diversity
is wonderful.
Keep in mind, the whole point of this little
subsection I'm trying to make is that knowledge,
now, can include diversity and difference.
Disagreement within itself.
This is a big change from knowledge, and it's
wonderful.
It's really important.
At the same time, in order for two people
to talk, there has to be so much agreement
and so much sameness.
Same language, interested in at least one
topic they can talk about, enough common assumptions
about how that domain works and what the facts
in that domain are, some sense of the norms
of conversation: who gets to talk, how much,
when you interrupt, all that sort of very
subtle thing.
Conversation, to be successful, needs to be
99% sameness.
I made the number up, but it's overwhelming
sameness, and then very small iterations on
top of that of difference.
That's a requirement for conversation.
It's also a requirement for the conversation
that you have with the people with whom you're
working and you want to move the ball forward.
You need an enormous amount of sameness.
The fact that there isn't an enormous amount
of difference in these conversations on the
web is again, not a failure of the conversations
on the web, it's a failure to recognize how
conversation works.
Now, having said all that, I don't know how
real the echo chamber effect is.
I suspect it is in at least some ways very
real.
But it doesn't actually matter too much whether
we have an exact measure of how damaging it
is.
We, I think, should have some confidence that
human beings do prefer to hang out with people
whose beliefs are the same as theirs, that
there is damage that can be done by doing
that, and that there is benefit to opening
ourselves up to more and further types of
belief.
No matter how damaging the echo chamber effect
is, doesn't matter.
We still need to be doing everything we can
to counteract it.
Both personally and institutionally and as
a business.
I will just take the, I'm very happy to be
here.
Nevertheless, the including of--.
Running Google's filters through my social
network pretty well ensures I'm going to get
more of the same, when in fact, I would rather--.
Speaking as a member of a culture I'm trying
to live in, I would rather have you disturb
me more.
I do appreciate that there's a button that
allows you to turn off the personalized, so
I can see.
I would also want you to--.
This is very similar to the long tail argument,
by the way.
You want to pull stuff out of the long tail,
and you want to disturb people like me so
I don't get too comfortable in my beliefs
that need challenging.
Okay.
And clearly, it's not simply a Google issue.
Bing does it, and the rest of it.
It's an industry issue.
So.
[sighs] Here's Moynihan, here's the promise,
the comfort that we will all come together
and we will come to agreement and that's what
knowledge is for.
No.
Knowledge is better off because, now, we recognize
that we don't agree and because we are linked
in those disagreements.
Knowledge is not the thing that is settled
anymore.
It is where this disagreement happens.
I should point out that this quotation, it's
unattributed.
We don't know if Moynihan actually said it,
who said it, or what the exact quote is, because
irony remains the fundamental law of the universe.
The fourth and last point is the web's too,
the internet is so scattered, so knowledge
is getting to scattered.
Well, no.
Books, the opposite of scattered.
They're literally bound together in sequence.
You can not get less scattered than a book.
This has been the medium of knowledge.
And from this has come a way of thinking about
how ideas go together, how knowledge, and
thus how the world itself, because knowledge
is a picture of the world.
Knowledge as it comes through books is a picture
of the world taken in short steps, each one
of which has been tied down with deductive
logic or with strong evidence.
If you're writing a book, you're going to
start your readers at A, you're going to try
to get them to Z by taking these short, measured
steps.
That is the ideal in our culture.
That has been the ideal of knowledge.
It's the person who's sitting there writing
the long-form work that proves her or his
point.
But there are problems with this that go unnoticed
when all we have are books.
For example, it means that we write in private,
which, if you're designing a knowledge ecology,
seems entirely backwards.
You want to be working on this in public,
so that when, for example, Darwin, who obviously
wrote one of the great long-form works.
In The Origin of Species, the first five chapters
lay out the theory.
The next six chapters is Darwin sitting alone,
by himself, thinking about all the awful things
that people will say who object to his theory
that he's worked on for decades.
Some of those objections were real.
He was socially-- He was out among his colleagues
and his social network.
But some were also him thinking, "One might
say.
One might object."
It's a totally suboptimal way of doing this,
but it's what you had to do because you're
writing.
That's how you wrote: in private.
Now we don't have to do that so much.
Another problem with the long-form, book-based
long-form is that you're trying to get your
readers to Z.
You're trying to keep them on the tour bus.
Books, in some ways, are too short.
long-form is too short, or it's not wide enough.
You have to try to keep them focused, keep
them focused, even though there's a whole
landscape full of interesting ideas and diversions
and possibility.
"No!
Stay on the bus!
You're on a tour!
I'm in charge of the tour!
We're going to go like this, and we're going
to get here.
And then later, you can go explore.
But it's my damn tour bus."
A third problem--.
And now that's a lost opportunity, that's
a paring down of information and of knowledge.
The third is, that even though we love and
adore long-form works of knowledge, they very
rarely work.
It's very rare that you'll actually start
at A and get all the way to Z.
Origin of Species, yeah.
At least for me, I think most people in this
room, you get to Z.
That's a great work.
And it happens occasionally.
But it doesn't work nearly as often as we
think it does, which, I think, maybe should
make us think that this is a poor way of trying
to reconstitute the world.
That the world maybe doesn't work as short
steps that lean in a long chain.
That maybe God doesn't think in long-form
arguments.
Because they don't work, generally.
They often just feel like arbitrary constructions.
So I'm certainly not saying that books are
going away, going to be replaced by Twitter
or whatever.
[laughter] But it seems pretty clear to me
that books are losing their pride of place
as the epitome of knowledge.
The widest and where knowledge lives.
Knowledge lives on networks now.
The opposite of long-form is not short-form,
it's in fact web-form.
It's the web.
If Darwin were alive now, one assumes that
he would be tweeting from the Beagle as it
goes around the Galapagos, and writing his
blog, and posting into archive dot org, and
getting things wrong and right.
There would be a web of people, some of whom
he knew, most of whom he doesn't, who are
correcting him, arguing with him, bringing
in their own evidence to support or to deny,
to explain his works to people who otherwise
wouldn't understand them, to make money off
of him as travel agents on tours of the Galapagos.
"See the finches yourself!
Go on a wild finch hunt!"
A web would grow up.
Darwin would publish, perhaps, his work, his
long-form work.
But it would have more value embedded in the
web than alone on a bookcase.
Knowledge actually, now, lives in this network.
It's at the level of a network, of people
corresponding, disagreeing, agreeing, enhancing,
differing in every possible way.
That's where knowledge is.
You can see this in action.
This is an example I'm borrowing from Michael
Nielsen, who's Reinventing Discovery--.
It came out about a month ago.
Really good book about network knowledge in
science.
He, in conversation, points so the faster
than light neutrinos, about which I know nothing.
But the original article was posted in archive
dot org, prepress, no peer review, no guarantee
that it's been, just put it up there as is.
Within a couple months, there had been 80
other articles posted there, plus countless
other ways that people wade in all across
the web.
Expanding, expounding, proposing ideas, explaining
to people like me who couldn't otherwise understand
it.
This web is where the knowledge was.
It did not go through peer review.
If it went through peer review, it would be
two years before it got published.
Maybe a year and a half if they hurry.
Then somebody would write a letter, and three
months later the letter would be published.
It's too slow.
You can't scale science this way.
We already know this, for example, from genetics.
Very similar sort of thing.
Open access could not be more important.
The knowledge lives in the web.
One of the reasons I think this is really
important is that previous media were other
people deciding what's interesting to us.
They'd be right or wrong, and frequently,
they'd be right.
But frequently, they'd be wrong.
The web consists--.
It's not that it's a crowd that's deciding
what's interesting to us.
It's that the web is a direct reflection of
what's interesting to us.
Every link is an expression of human interest.
A direct expression of human interest.
The web overall is an expression of what we
as a species care about, at least, people
on the web.
It can be very distressing, because apparently
about 50% of what we care about is porn.
Nevertheless, that's what it is.
Each of these links is something human and
live.
It is a direct expression of what matters
to us.
This is a transformative of knowledge.
Why did knowledge turn out to be so fragile,
to go back to that original question?
I promised you I can't answer it.
But I want to point to one, well actually,
two points.
The first is that if you go through the traditional
list of characteristics of knowledge, that
there's only one knowledge, it's singular,
it's settled, it's unchanging, neat and organized,
it's relatively scarce, it's impersonal in
that anybody, whatever is true is true for
everybody.
You look at the characteristics of network
knowledge.
These characteristics are characteristics,
I believe, not only of knowledge, but also
of the internet, because that's my hypothesis.
The new medium is giving knowledge its new
properties.
These are also characteristics of the world
that we live in.
What it means to live in a world as a human
being.
It's overwhelming, it's unsettled, it's unresolved,
it's messy, it's deeply, endlessly connected,
but sometimes loosely connected.
It's held together by the fact that the world
matters to us, that it's interesting to us,
that we care about it.
The first conclusion, --I should maybe put
conclusion in air quotes-- but the first conclusion
is that network knowledge may or may not be
better knowledge, truer knowledge.
I think that in general, this is the greatest
time in human history to be somebody who cares
about knowledge.
So I would say, "Yeah, generally, it is truer.
But leave that aside, let's not have that
argument."
Nevertheless, network knowledge, the knowledge
that we see emerging on the web, is truer
to the nature of knowledge.
That is, to knowledge as part of the human
condition, as truer to the world in which
we live.
As opposed to the old that said, "No, we can
settle things with certainty by passing them
through expert filters."
No.
We couldn't do that.
The second conclusion, the last thing I want
to say, is that, despite Moynihan and the
Enlightenment, what we have in common is not
knowledge.
That's not what's going to enable us to live
together peacefully in the world.
We're not going to agree about things.
What we have in common is not knowledge about
which we agree, but what we have in common
is a shared world about which we disagree.
What makes me hopeful is that on the web and
with knowledge in particular on the web, I
do see us getting far better, more sophisticated,
and in some ways more tolerant of disagreement,
and in fact, enabling difference, using difference
to advance us.
If there's going to be peace through knowledge,
it's going to be a very, very noisy peace.
Thank you.
[applause]
>>Female #1: So, questions at the mike.
>>Weinberger: Questions at the mike. [clears
throat] I'm sorry to have gone so long.
>>Female #1: Oh, it's still early.
>>Male #1: Thanks for your presentation.
But it made me curious: why did you decide
to write a book to express all of that?
>>Weinberger: Why did I write a book?
A couple reasons.
I'm old fashioned.
My parents would be proud if they were here.
And the web doesn't yet pay advances.
[laughter] I'm sorry, that's--.
Unfortunately, those are honest answers.
And they're not very good answers, which is
why it's unfortunate.
Maybe saying in my defense, I do a lot on
the web, too.
[pause]
>>Male #2: Even if the--.
Well, taking that what you're saying is right,
that the knowledge is across the web in the
network, how do you think about--.
There's still, presumably, even if people
have different opinions, relatively more valuable
information knowledge there and a lot of crap,
for lack of a better word.
Do you form any judgment about differentiating
stuff that may be valuable to different people
versus what's less valuable to everybody?
>>Weinberger: Yes.
I mean, we have to.
We have to, otherwise we [pause] we'll die,
and we'll kill others inadvertently.
So yeah, we have to do this.
It seems to me the only process is basically
a political one.
I don't meant through elected officials, though
that plays a part, but rather, it's what it
has, in fact, always been as the postmodernists--.
And all of this, by the way, postmodernists
say, everything I just said.
Except that now, it's actually real on the
web.
They said that too, by the way.
As they have long said and recognized, knowledge
has been imbued with struggles for power.
That was hidden to us to some extent because
the victors were so absolute in their victory.
You couldn't hear all the disagreement.
All you could hear was what was coming through
the broadcast towers, and they're pretty much
in agreement.
So it was hidden from us.
But it was there, because it was a solid victory
for those who gained control of the means
of knowledge.
We are, I think, destined forever to be in
a continuous negotiation and political struggle
to try to get what we believe with good cause
is the truth to carry policy and to inform
people's minds.
There's no--.
The old technique of establishing a canon
and basically removing access to everything
outside of that canon simply won't work anymore.
There was an enormous price to that old technique
as well, so I don't think this is all bad.
This, to me, is a more realistic--.
We now have a more realistic assessment of
how knowledge works.
To put this more positively, I think this
is very close to how scientists actually think
and work.
They come to important conclusions.
They base important decisions on those conclusions.
But they always talk about hypotheses and
evidence, and are aware that it could be wrong.
That's a more adult view of knowledge than
the "It says it in the Encyclopedia on the
page, so it's got to be right" view, which
is only a bit of a caricature of our previous
paper-based approach.
[pause]
>>Male #3: Hi.
In another life, I'm a math and science teacher.
Much of our time is spent disseminating.
The debate is around "What should we teach?"
as opposed to "Why?" or "How?"
Even when we use social media and web, it's
to disseminate or to help students to find
information.
Based on your research, what do you see as
helpful going forward for using the web, that
knowledge base?
>>Weinberger: I would always defer to a teacher
who's actually teaching.
Having said that, I'm about to say things
that will be foolish, at best.
[pause] [sighs] I have nothing interesting
to say.
There are obviously levels of things that
we want taken as fact, and are fact.
No reason to dispute them.
We want our students to know those, and not
to have serious doubts about them, always
to be slightly skeptical.
That's what we've always done as part of the
educational system.
We clearly need to continue doing that.
It's not, "Well, just go out, build a Wiki,
and whatever you believe is true", because
it's not true that whatever you believe is
true.
The phrase "Well, that's true for you" actually
drives me insane.
Because in that case, we're not talking about
truth.
And we do need to be talking about truth in
the educational system.
There are a couple things I think may be happening.
I think they're all obvious.
One is I think we're beginning to understand
through the web and somewhat through our children
that learning is not simply about enriching
the individual.
That's nice, that's important, but that's
a selfish act.
You get educated and you become a better person,
and that's grand.
Maybe you become a better citizen and you
help others.
But so much--.
You look at the software development community,
the environment that they, or perhaps I should
say you, have built for themselves.
It is so generous and so amazingly productive.
It's reasonable to argue that the software
developers have built the best environment
for rapid learning we've ever had in our history.
You have a question, you'll get it answered.
You need a code fragment, it's there.
It's there for free.
When you do your own, you'll improve that
one or do another, you'll make it free.
This culture of learning in public as an act
that is not only bettering you, but is bettering
the public, that is an amazing thing within
the software world.
I hope that it will become an amazing thing
within the educational system overall.
It's not simply about me making you smarter,
my student.
It's about us learning together, A, of course,
and B, doing this in public as a way of improving
the world in which we all live.
Helping students to be literate about the
web, that would also be really, really helpful
as well.
That's beginning to happen.
But it seems a little slower than I would
have expected.
[pause] I told you I had nothing.
[laughter]
>>Male #4: Part of the value of pursuing a
one definitive truth is that, at least in
theory, it should have a correspondence with
an objective reality.
If you understand gravity, you understand
the motions of the planets.
If we lessen our focus on the one truth, does
it lessen our ability to be able to optimize
our reality?
For example, coming up with economic policies
that actually grow economies or safety policies
that keep us safe.
>>Weinberger: First of all, we absolutely
should be trying to head towards the one truth.
We just call it "the truth."
The world is one way, and it is not another.
I firmly believe that.
And we should be, of course, heading as far
as, doing our best with that.
I'm going to reject your metaphysics, but
accept your conclusion.
I have-- Maybe the shorthand for this is that
I'm basically a Heideggerian, and take a more
phenomenological approach, so I don't--.
The correspondence idea of truth, that it's
a set of statements that corresponds to how
the real world is, for me, leads out the way
in which truth is an aspect of how we engage
with the world, not an independent picture
of it.
We can leave that argument aside.
I'm not sure that it actually makes a difference.
And still think that yes, we absolutely have
to be trying to figure out what's true about
the world so that we can make good policies
that will then affect the world.
That's crucial.
I want to be clear about what I was saying
before, because we need scientists, we need
mathematicians, we need sociologists, we need
everybody to be working on this.
What I was saying before is we should give
up on the hope that we're all going to agree
about the facts.
But there are still facts, and we still need
to be pursuing them for precisely the reason
you say, because the real world, reality,
our fates, depend upon them.
I've compressed the metaphysics and accept
the beginning and end of your statement.
[laughs]
>>Female #2: I want to thank you for coming
to Google today.
>>Weinberger: Thank you for having me.
Oh,
>>Female #2: and that's it!
[laughter]
>>Weinberger: Thank you very much.
[applause]
