Robot Writing

Is the internet distracting and dizzying? According to David Weinberger, it is. (He says it with affection, though.) And, I agree. It is. With the advent of high-speed connection, wifi, and tabs (tabs!), the amount of discipline and self-policing required to actually, like, get shit done is staggering at best.  But it's also the most fluid, unrestricted means of accessing information or conducting research. Using search engines to find articles or websites or blogs, to answer a question (or, at least, to approach an answer to a question) is fantastically easy. From those articles or websites or blogs, you can often find one or several hyperlinked articles with relevant or related information, turning what could look like a linear pathway of information into a twisting, amorphous tree of information, with many pathways leading up and outward, like reaching branches. This model of an information network is daunting and enormous. The pathways are infinite, and the information ...

A friend of mine recently revealed to me a bit of the wisdom by which he leads his life: "If you're the smartest person in the room," he says, as the saying goes, "you're in the wrong room." The dated phrase may be gathering dust or suffering from arthritic joint pain, but I abide it. I find that surrounding myself with brilliant people presents me with the daily challenge of keeping up, meeting their knowledge, approaching their understanding. Being in the company of smart people makes me want to be smart enough to earn their company, and that motivates me to exercise my brain often and well.  In his book  Too Big To Know  (Perseus, 2011), technologist and author David Weinberger demands a recalculation of this useful maxim. The network, or the internet, he claims, is changing knowledge. By changing the way we access and interact with knowledge (relocating information from books, libraries, and our physical brains to networked webpages), the internet has ...