Geek Quote of the Day
Books and formal papers make knowledge look finite, knowable. By embracing the unfinished, unfinishable forms of the web we are truer to the spirit of enquiry – and to the world we live in.
Knowledge is fast reshaping itself around its new, networked medium – thereby becoming closer to what it truly was all along.
The internet has decisively moved us from belief in a knowledge of universal essences because it has made plain two facts: we don’t agree, and we can’t let that stop us.
Even after the question is settled, the knowledge will live not in the final article but in that web of discussion, debate, elucidation and disagreement. It’s messy, but messiness is how you scale knowledge.
Knowledge has inherited many other of the web’s properties. It is now linked across all boundaries, it is unsettled, it never comes fully to rest or agreement, and we can see that it is bigger than any of us could ever traverse.
- - “The internet shows the messy truth about knowledge” by David Weinberger, February 15, 2012.
First published by New Scientist.