(via curiositycounts)
Too Big to Know is about what happens to knowledge when it becomes a network. The basic idea is that the properties of knowledge that we’ve taken for granted at least in the West for, oh, 2,500 years are not actually properties of knowledge. They’re properties of knowledge when its medium is paper. And when you remove the paper and put things online, it takes on the properties of its new medium—of the Internet. Importantly, knowledge in a network includes differences and disagreements in a way that traditional knowledge is uncomfortable with. Everything is unsettled, everything is argued about, and very few things are ever totally resolved on the Net.
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Knowledge in the Internet Age—networked knowledge—is becoming more like what knowledge has been in the past few hundreds years for scientists: it’s provisional, it’s a hypothesis that is waiting to be disproved. Knowledge is now accepted as the best we humans can do at the moment, but with the hope that we will turn out to be wrong—and thus to advance our knowledge. What’s happening to networked knowledge seems to make it much closer to the scientific idea of what knowledge is.
