"Too Big to Know" was an extraordinary listen & read. After listening to the Audible.com version twice, I purchased a Kindle edition, so I could refer to the text & read excerpts to friends and family.
The author's exploration of cyberspace and its effect on our future way of life is richly informative. He provides historical background, current events, and examples of the "bottom-up" creativity and problem-solving made possible in the virtual world of electronic IT. This includes old ideas made new, such as "crowd sourcing", and new ideas such "jellies" and "jams" (have to read his book if you don't already know) that are democratizing society was well as providing exciting new capabilities.
Mr. Weinberger masterfully contrasts how and why the on-line electronic world is different from the two previous information ages -- the invention of writing, followed some 5,000 years later by Gutenberg's invention of a moveable-type printing press. The physical ability to record facts and ideas and make them available in other places and other times was one of humankind's very best ideas. However this flash of brilliance was limited by the nature of ancient technology -- writing required physical material that could be written on and also preserved, stored and distributed.
Counting and recording numbers first consisted of tying sequential knots in a long cord. From this act of 're-cording', comes the verb 'to record' and the plural noun 'records', which also gave us literacy and the cottage industry of scribes. As the centuries rolled by, scribes made marks in wet clay, chiseled the history of their civilization in stone, used carbon ink to write on pappyus-reed sheaves, animal skin scrolls, and eventually wood-pulp paper that could be bound into manuscripts and books. Amassed together, these bound treasures of information, imagination and at time great beauty, gave us the institution of libraries.
Locking information up for posterity in bound books is both the extraordinary gift of a physical hard-copy and also its curse. The difficulty and expense of book publishing created a sense of scarcity, that in turn promoted "long-form" writing -- inclusive, sometime exhaustive works that often are already out-of-date before they are published. The finish product is necessarily sequential, starting with page one and going in order to the end. Its contents and the way material is presented was fixed for all eternity on the day it went to the printer.
"Too Big To Know" is the story of the exciting and astonishing shift way from the limitions of paper and hard-copy publishing -- limits that we frequently didn't recognize. For goldfish in a bowl, the water it swims in is invisible. But more important, its entire watery world depends on the container -- a fact so easy to overlook. Likewise, the tradition of hard-copy books is a rigid container for information, one that we don't think of any more than the goldfish ponders the hard-side glass bowl in which it lives.
The electronic technologies of the 20th and 21st century have quietly replaced the finite and expensive technology of 'hard-copy' bound books. These information containers walled off btw to two covers limited us as readers and writers, but equally important, also required cutting down trees and shipping paper (both before and after being printed) cross-country on trucks for distribution.
Liberated from this, the electronic world of the Internet, email, PDFs, cloud storage provides us with a virtually infinite ability to *arrange and rearrange electrons* and shoot them to the far side of the globe before we can stand up to answer the phone.
The full story of "Too Big To Know" is too big to tell in a book review, so you'll have to buy the book. I recommend starting with the mp3 audio version, as this long but fascinating story is the perfect accompaniment for a long commute, or listening while cooking, washing dishes or gardening. It's also a great gift for a geeky friend.
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Top reviews from other countries
- Susan StepneyReviewed in the United Kingdom on August 9, 2014
when and how web-based knowledge can be superior to book-based
- Rob KitchinReviewed in the United Kingdom on March 1, 2013
interesting and thought-provoking, but not always a convincing argument
