LITA Forum Saturday Keynote: Knowledge in the Age of Abundance

October 5, 2009

When David Weinberger, author and fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society talks, I listen up. So his opening the presentation by saying that “the Age of Information is pretty much over” was tough news to take first thing on a Saturday morning. (Although we’ve been hearing that since at least 2002, it’s still pretty shocking for those of us making a living organizing and passing around information.) But LITA Forum’s Saturday keynote speaker quickly explained himself, saying that people didn’t stop using stones when the stone age ended; the information age is over because we’ve moved beyond a time when we place so much value on a relatively small amount of data. And whatever this shift away from the Information Age means, we can be sure it’ll be interesting.

We’ve entered the age of abundance, as Weinberger calls it, where the old ways of reducing knowledge to a few data points and paring things down to, say, whatever can fit on a catalog card or even a full MARC record, have given way to an age where there is simply too much information to handle.  While a lot of that information is good, most of it is crap, he said, quickly pointing out that with sophisticated spam filters, pop-up blockers, and so forth, we’re actually better at weeding out the bad stuff than we are at dealing with the good stuff.

“Knowing the world means understanding the chaos and seeing the meaning,” Weinberger said. Handling the good stuff, it seems, is difficult because we like knowledge to be settled and neatly packaged, not chaotic, and in books mostly. And recreating discourse among these books is tedious work: Footnotes are there if we want them, sure, but who really follow them regularly? Books, therefore, and footnotes are dead ends.This is how Western culture has always handled knowledge, said Weinberger. We assume knowledge is basically simple, scarce, and settled. Fortunately, this model lends itself very well to libraries and how they work.

But the Age of Abundance has blown apart the simplicity, settled-ness, and scarcity of knowledge, giving way to more transparency through hyperlinking–just like footnotes in many ways, but “hyper.” Whereas most punctuation tells us when to stop and for how long, the HTML anchor tag element is punctuation, if you will, that tells us to go somewhere. Citing the Scottish philosopher Andy Clark, Weinberger explained that the internet becomes almost a sort of extension of our mind (scaffolding, he called it) so that we think with our brains and store information elsewhere.

Weinberger was quick to point out that there were four ways in which abundance of information makes us stupid. First, we often can’t find information. There’s too much of it. But we’re getting better at building systems to handle the abundance, he said, and we’ll only continue to get better. Second, the digital divide is getting worse as the skill set needed to function in a digital environment grows. Third, we stay within our comfort zones. Where there is so much information, we’re drawn to that which interests us. Last, we’re pretty lazy by nature. Although Wikipedia has rich “Talk” pages to encourage discourse about its articles, most of us pay no attention to them.

While the internet has a huge potential to make us stupid, overall it’s making us smarter, said Weinberger. The web mirrors the fundamental architecture of morality, he asserted, and compassion and curiosity are our bulwarks. And the one thing the web is teaching our children, according to Weinberger, is that the world and its people are far more interesting than we are told.

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