Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A unified theory of the Web

Small Pieces Loosely Joined looks, unfortunately, like geek lit. This is because it's about the Internet. But think for a minute: The Internet isn't just for geeks any more. Plenty of grandmothers on the Net these days. We tend to look at the Internet and think "technology". But we don't look at a telephone, or a car, or a microwave, or a stereo and think "technology", we think "thing to use". And increasingly, that is what the Internet is - just another tool.
An extremely important and flexible tool, though, and, David Weinberger argues, one that both changes how we are as a society and reflects how we are as human beings - which is why this isn't geek lit at all. It's got more philosophy and sociology in it than it has technology.
Weinberger's thesis is that the Internet, because it is a shared construction with no central design or control, tells us what we are really like as opposed to what we think we are like. He considers seven concepts: Space, time, perfection, togetherness, knowledge, matter, and hope. Each gets a chapter, and in each chapter he contrasts what he calls "our default philosophy" - which is basically post-Enlightenment Cartesian modernism - with how we actually behave.
In this "default philosophy", we tend to think of space as being a grid of equidistant lines on which all points are essentially equal. But when we create the Web, he notes, which we refer to with spatial metaphors - "visiting sites", for example - we demonstrate that our real concept of a space is "somewhere where there is something I care about". Not all spaces are equal and they are not on any kind of grid. Because web pages can link to each other freely, the concepts of "close" and "distant" work differently from our real-world experience; we can wander freely, drawn by our interests, and one page being "close" to another simply means that the person who created one of them cared about the other one.
Time, similarly, is not a series of equal-sized moments following one another, but is made up of threads - again, discussions about things that interest us. Several threads can be running at the same time in the same place - such as a chat room - and the fact that they are simultaneous doesn't mean that they are related. On the other hand, the fact that a thread stretches out over months doesn't mean that the discussion is not connected. And on the Net, we can go back and look at the earlier parts of the discussion at any time.
This makes things messy. And messy is human. Weinberger points out that corporations which spend fortunes on producing a "perfect" web presence with an impersonal marketing voice have, in many ways, not understood the medium. On the Net, voices are personal, and part of their personal quality is their imperfection. And we tend to trust the imperfect, personal voices more than the perfect, impersonal voices. Isn't that interesting?
The consequence, of course, is that there is a lot of unreliable, incomplete, badly written or simply false information on the Web. And this isn't going to change. It's part of how it works. In fact, it is essential to how it works. If everything had to pass a Board of Control, the Web wouldn't function and, indeed, wouldn't be interesting. And, as Weinberger notes, "It is not headed towards agreement. Ever."
My response to that is: What a great opportunity - a space in which we can interact with other people who will never agree with us and whose voices we can never suppress. What great practice for how society is changing!
I love Wikipedia. I write and edit articles for Wikipedia. Wikipedia rocks. But I recognize that its ideals, of collecting all human knowledge into a collaboratively-created encyclopedia written with a "neutral point of view", are basically quixotic, because the Web doesn't work like that. In fact, people don't work like that - nobody has a "neutral point of view". Which is pretty much Weinberger's point.
In his chapter on togetherness, he points out how the Net creates a new, third way of being - neither an unconnected individual (which is how the "default philosophy" sees us), nor part of a faceless demographic segment (which is how advertisers and broadcast media companies see us), but a "faceful mass".
On the Web, says Weinberger, "all fame is local". People are famous in a limited field, among a group of people who are into what they are into - but the fame can be reciprocal. Everyone in the group can be famous to each other, and at the same time, known as a quirky individual, not a mythical perfect famous person.
And because it is so easy to form groups on the Net, he argues, we demonstrate what we consciously deny: We are not isolated individual monads, we are constituted by our relationships.
Further, he argues in his next chapter (on knowledge), we are constituted as embodied beings - an interesting conclusion to emerge out of looking at a technology in which bodies play a limited role. His thinking goes this way: Knowledge that we trust on the Net comes from people with something of a human face and voice - not necessarily from people with qualifications. This is because knowledge is inherently uncertain and we secretly recognise this - and make our decisions, not based on a perfect decision-making process, but on how much we trust people. And we trust people who appear, on one hand, to know what they're talking about, but on the other hand are "real", who have passions, who don't have a "neutral point of view", because they're like us and we identify with them. As creatures with bodies we have to filter all the time for personal relevance and interest. We do that in the context of relationship and what we value: knowledge and relevance arise out of context and connection.
There are basically two kinds of knowledge on the Web, Weinberger says: the database and the joke. Databases are useful, but jokes are interesting. Databases can give exact knowledge, but jokes can give insight, unexpected knowledge - self-knowledge.
As a sidelight, Weinberger argues interestingly about the idea of some thinkers (such as Ray Kurzweil) who hold that human personalities can become immortal by being translated into non-fleshy states (uploaded to computers, effectively). His objection to this is that a human personality isn't just a set of thoughts, it is everything that arises from being in a body - a very interesting argument coming from a technologist.
He carries the argument on in the chapter on matter, in which he examines Descartes' idea that mental stuff and physical stuff are basically different and must be translated - through the pineal gland, was Descartes' theory. This chapter is fairly technical, both philosophically and also technologically (he goes into how the information that makes up the Web is actually moved around, at different levels of detail). I won't attempt to summarize in depth; you need to read the chapter. But basically, he is building on his argument that human passion is the centre of the web, and adding some thoughts about meaning and reality which lead on to his final chapter, hope.
This chapter summarizes the rest of the book and stresses that the Web is exciting because it helps us overcome our alienation from ourselves as social, embodied, imperfect, authentic, passionate people who are engaged with things according to their relevance to what we care about, and who treat the world as meaningful and filled with meaning. Our default philosophy says we're not like that; the Net says we are.
It would be possible, of course, to argue with every one of Weinberger's points. And I'm sure he would encourage you to do so. He is, after all, presenting his viewpoint and his passion in his own, authentic voice.