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 changed and is changing the structure or foundation of knowledge and what it means to know. Because the internet connects information and people, any given person's individual knowledge becomes a part of the network. Connect billions of people, and our bank of knowledge is immediately, unfathomably huge. Like, fucking really big.
What does this have to do with being the smartest person in the room? A lot. The internet has become a continuously growing room of people, and has become the largest storage-center for human knowledge ever. Ever.
"The smartest person in the room," says Weinberger, "is the room itself[.]"
Just as we've built the room, we are the room. And just as we are the room, the room is (maybe) infinitely more intelligent than any one human or group of humans can be. This new structure or form of knowledge is exciting (and scary, because we only kind of get it). It demands that we reevaluate our notions of intellectual capability, shared knowledge, and that we adopt a new culture of knowledge; that is, we must ask ourselves how knowing our newborn community of knowing will alter our global cultural understanding of knowledge and truth and fact. (Too big to know, indeed.)
And we have no idea how much it (the internet) will change, or how big it can get, or how it will appear in its final form. So what this all means for us as a people isn't really clear. It's, at the moment, too big to know (new favorite phrase).
Mad cool, though, right?
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 changed and is changing the structure or foundation of knowledge and what it means to know. Because the internet connects information and people, any given person's individual knowledge becomes a part of the network. Connect billions of people, and our bank of knowledge is immediately, unfathomably huge. Like, fucking really big.
What does this have to do with being the smartest person in the room? A lot. The internet has become a continuously growing room of people, and has become the largest storage-center for human knowledge ever. Ever.
"The smartest person in the room," says Weinberger, "is the room itself[.]"
Just as we've built the room, we are the room. And just as we are the room, the room is (maybe) infinitely more intelligent than any one human or group of humans can be. This new structure or form of knowledge is exciting (and scary, because we only kind of get it). It demands that we reevaluate our notions of intellectual capability, shared knowledge, and that we adopt a new culture of knowledge; that is, we must ask ourselves how knowing our newborn community of knowing will alter our global cultural understanding of knowledge and truth and fact. (Too big to know, indeed.)
And we have no idea how much it (the internet) will change, or how big it can get, or how it will appear in its final form. So what this all means for us as a people isn't really clear. It's, at the moment, too big to know (new favorite phrase).
Mad cool, though, right?
Great post. Being in contact with smart people can be a awarding challenge.
ReplyDelete