David Weinberger, the co-author of the iconic Cluetrain Manifesto, has just released another stunningly profound book. In 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, Weinberger – who is a Senior Researcher at Harvard’s illustrious Berkman Center for the Internet and Society – argues that we are now experiencing a fundamental shift in the nature of knowledge that we haven’t seen for 2500 years. Acclaimed by everyone from John Seely Brown to Clay Shirky to Mark Benioff, Too Big To Know may turn out to be the Cluetrain Manifesto of 2012 – a book that, once and for all, changes the way we think about the digital revolution.
“We invented knowledge to fit the medium,” Weinberger explained to me over Skype. And now that the medium has shifted from analog to digital, from paper to the link, from the curator to the audience, from the book to the Internet, we must once again reinvent knowledge to fit our new medium. For Weinberger, this means seeing knowledge as a network of people and things, driven by peer-reviewed sites like Wikipedia. Most of all, he told me, it means allowing knowledge to “live” on the web, where in its messy connectedness, it will reflect the way we really live and think.