Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room by David Weinberger

Author:David Weinberger
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Technology & Engineering, Sociology, Social Science, Social Aspects, Computers, General, Information Technology
ISBN: 0465021425
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2011-12-15T07:37:00+00:00

We do need stopping points, especially when the issues are less ill defined than “What happened at the Democratic Convention last night?” or “What role did social media play in a recent revolution?” or “How did Betty Friedan’s writing change history?” We frequently just need an answer so we can get on with our project. That’s why we have sites like WolframAlpha.com. The polymath Stephen Wolfram launched the site in 2009 to provide reliable, accurate answers to questions that can range from the prosaic (“How far away is the moon?”) to the whimsical (“How many gallons of milk would it take to fill up the moon?”), as well as far more abstruse scientific and mathematical inquiries. The sorts of questions it deals with have answers that can be known either by looking them up in a reputable source or by computing them from known information. For this, the project gathers curated supplies of information of many sorts and uses a variety of manual and automated techniques for checking their accuracy.34 We should trust WolframAlpha’s facts and its computations as much as we trusted the information in almanacs and other professionally edited source books, and for exactly the same reasons: They’ve been through editorial filters, they’ve been fact-checked, and reputations and businesses are at stake. WolframAlpha applies paper-based techniques to the networked medium, to good purpose, and improves upon them by being up to date and by computing answers in real time.

Even so, WolframAlpha is not a stopping point exactly like the older stopping points of knowledge. If a result on the site surprises you, you can click on the link that WolframAlpha always provides to see its sources. If you think the site made an error, there’s a blank box brightly labeled “Give us your feedback” at the bottom of the page. And there are links to related searches you might want to explore (“Volume of moon versus earth?”). Of course, the old almanac listed its sources and may have given you an address to send corrections to, but it was a slow, one-way medium with a dash of communication thrown in. WolframAlpha assumes a far greater level of engagement and assumes that you may want to turn your result into a link itself. So, while WolframAlpha uses the old paper-based techniques of authority, it does so within a network that changes the nature of the authorities presented as stopping points. When the authorities were functionally invisible to us—the editors of the encyclopedia, the authors of the textbooks—it was easy to imagine that the chain of authority simply ended there. Now we can see that the people in the box are not the end of the story. They are in linked networks themselves. The chain of authority has no end. We will accept authorities for many of the old reasons, as well as some new ones, but more than ever we know that authorities are stopping points because we choose to stop with them. Transparency shows us that we could choose to go on.

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