David Weinberger's Small Pieces Loosely Joined is a modern classic. And while it had inspired my own writing about the Internet, I had somehow failed to share that fact with others. His 'unified theory of the web' touched upon some of the most positive aspects of the web's essence and that truly moved me. It made me more optimistic about the Internet, about its future and about its positive implications for us all. In his words, "The web has hit our culture with a force unlike that of any modern technology" but he also noted that "at no point is the web merely technology." He describes the web as extending our senses of hearing and sight. But it's also creating a new, persistent public space where our extended bodies can go. His message of the web as a medium is this: Ultimately, matter doesn't matter. If we can be together so successfully in a world that has no atoms, no space, no uniform time, no management, and no control, then maybe we've been wrong about what matters in the real world in the first place." Each chapter offers some extremely interesting thoughts that deserve a great deal of consideration.
You might ask about Facebook, MySpace or any of the social networks today? Weinberger was first to describe the web as a social place that's been constructed voluntarily out of our passion to show others how the world looks to us; he sees those billions of pages as the social expression of this passion. These websites were built because their authors cared enough about something to take the time to write it down. The bits on the web are only bits because they are both physical and mental at the same time. We find that passion, words and the presence of others are inexplicably messy relationships on the web. These are the things that are most real there and they bind us into something more than what we are as individual pieces of matter. In some ways, it's much like the world we live in... and, at the same time, unlike the world as we think about it. In the end, it's an indivisible person that is having his ideas changed by the web. Because he is that same person offline as he is online, those ideas will also affect the world that he lives in.
In his last chapter entitled Hope, Weinberger's eloquent writing is too good to ignore, "But the web is ours. Like a book, we are writing it, filling its pages with passionate views of our lives and world. Like a conversation, we are talking across, and despite the distances, about what matters to us, from the amusing to the life enhancing to the death defying. Like a language, the web enables us to meet not in distance but in meanings. Like the world, it is an abiding place where we can accomplish together whatever it is that our caring natures put us up to." And then he added, "Unlike the real world, the new world of the web is thoroughly and inalienably ours... We are sharing this new world not because we have to but because we want to."
This is the book that will help you understand the Internet. Not only has it captured its essence, it is also an easy read for anyone. But don't be surprised if you find that its pages are filled with the most wondrous of thoughts... just like our real world. This just might be a good way to begin... using the Internet in earnest to better understand the world around us.
Bob Magnant is the author of The Last Transition..., a fact-based novel about politics, the Internet and US policy in the Middle East...
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