I was surfing to WGBH on Saturday when I came across a lecture by with David Weinberger (surrounding his new book Too Big to Know).
I was sucked in when he eluded to brick and mortar libraries as yesterdays public commons, and pointed to discontinuous and disconnected nature of books / paper. The epitaph may read something like this “book killed by hyperlink, the facts of the matter are whatever you make them.”
Overall David, in his look at the science of knowledge, points at many interesting transitions that the cloud is bringing:
- Books/Paper are discontinuous and disconnected – giving way to the Internet which is constantly connected and massively hyper/inter-linked
- “the Facts are NOT the Facts” which is to point out that arguments are what we make of the information presented, and our analytics given a particular context. What we claim as a fact, may in reality proved to be a fallacy -gt; just look at Louis Pasteur and germ theory. History has so many moments like this.
- Differences and Disagreements are themselves valuable knowledge. For me this is certainly true, learning typically comes through challenge of preconception.
- There is an ecology of knowledge – There are a set of interconnected entities that existing within an environment. These actors represent a complex set of interrelationships, a set of positive and negative reinforcements, that act as governors on this system. These promoters/detractors act to balance fact/fallacy so as to create the system tension that supports insight (knowledge?). It’s these new insights that themselves create the next arguments – the end goal being?
I wanted to share this book because I believe that it re-enforces the need for businesses to think about their cloud – big data strategies. The question becomes less of “do I move my information to the cloud?” and more of “how do I benefit from the linkage that the Internet can provide to my information?” so as to provide new insights from big data.
Read the book, take the challenge!
