This site is about the book Too Big to Know that David Weinberger to be published in January 2012 (available in the middle of December 2011) by Basic Books.
Too Big to Know is about what happens to knowledge and expertise now that we are faced with the fact that there is way way way more to know than can be known by any individual. Its hypothesis is that knowledge and expertise are becoming networks, and are taking on the properties of networks.
Get a copy online or from your local bookstore
Excerpt and interview at The Atlantic.
Cory Doctorow's review at BoingBoing.net. Jeff Jarvis' review at BuzzMachine.
"Will this be one of the big books of 2012? Probably." — Tyler Cowen
"Too Big to Know is a stunning and profound book on how our concept of knowledge is changing in the age of the net. It honors the traditional social practices of knowing, where genres stay fixed, and provides a graceful way of understanding new strategies for knowing in today's rapidly evolving, networked world. I couldn't put this book down. It is a true tour du force written in a delightful way."
- John Seely Brown Co-author of The Social Life of Information (2000) and of a New Culture of Learning (2011); Visiting Scholar and Advisor to the Provost, USC; Former Chief Scientist, Xerox Corporation and Director of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)
"With this insightful book, David Weinberger cements his status as one of the most important thinkers of the digital age. If you want to understand what it means to live in a world awash in information, Too Big to Know is the guide you've been looking for."
— Daniel H. Pink author of Drive and A Whole New Mind
"Too Big To Know is Weinberger's brilliant synthesis of myriad debates—information overload, echo chambers, the wisdom of crowds—into a single vision of life and work in an era of networked knowledge."— Clay Shirky author of Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus
"Led by the Internet, knowledge is now social, mobile, and open. Weinberger shows how to unlock the benefits."
— Marc Benioff chairman, CEO salesforce.com, bestselling author of Behind the Cloud
"Too Big to Know is an inspiring read—especially for networked leaders who already believe that the knowledge to change the world is living and active, personal, and vastly interconnected. Weinberger casts the vision of designing networks for the greater good and gives us excellent examples of what that looks like in action, even as he warns us of the pitfalls that await us."
—Tony Burgess Cofounder, CompanyCommand.com
"Too Big to Know is a refreshing antidote to the doomsday literature of information overload. Weinberger outlines a bold Net infrastructure strategy that is inclusive rather that exclusive, creates more useful information, exploits linking technologies, and encourages institutional participation. The result is a network that is both 'a commons and a wilds' where the excitement lies in the limitless possibilities that connected human beings can realize."
—David S. Ferriero Archivist of the United States
#1 by Randall Lee Reetz on August 28, 2011 - 12:29 pm
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This isn’t anything new. The Universe has always been “too big to know”. Of course! The strangeness of the new overwhelm is not that there is too much to know, but that we are, as a species, so new to the abstraction business that our only experience of knowledge would suggest that it could fit into an individual brain.
Evolution is the process of internalizing those parts of the external environment that matter. Should your goals be simple survival, then the resultant abstraction can be small and simple (avoid cliffs and things with big teeth – eat things that fall off of cliffs and that don’t run from your own big teeth!). But evolution doesn’t care about individual survival agendas. Evolution only cares about one thing… reducing energy and structural clines – making things fall down faster. Maximizing the rate of thermodynamic diffusion, the only process that is truly domain independent, requires the acquisition of an internalization of the most salient patterns that govern the dynamics of all systems. This meta-filtering requires what we label “intelligence”. Intelligence is the ability to build a more and more accurate abstraction of the influence hierarchy, a ranking of what matters and what doesn’t, and why.
The better your internal map of THE influence hierarchy, the faster you can reduce clines. The faster you can reduce clines, the more profound will be your influence on the future.
Evolution is an NP hard problem. Meaning, there is no way to know the solution to the problem until it is solved, and even then, the solution you know is only one of the possible solutions or histories. The process that is evolution’s meandering path through probability space is the ultimate example what happens when a problem is “too big to know”. Finally, we humans have reached a level of knowledge that allows us to quantitize and compute on problems that reflect the enormity of class of problems that result in the phenomenon we call “change”.
Randall Lee Reetz
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#2 by Tim Stahmer on January 3, 2012 - 11:01 am
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Loved Everything is Miscellaneous and have been looking forward to this new book. However, Amazon says the Kindle version isn’t coming until September 1. Seems odd for any work about the fluidity of information not to have the digital edition available at the same time as analog.
#3 by Bricoleur on January 5, 2012 - 4:23 pm
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@ Tim Stahmer … I just downloaded! Suggest you try again!
#4 by steve felix on January 8, 2012 - 10:23 am
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Hi. Did I miss it or how can I subscribe to your blog? Thanks.
#5 by dweinberger on January 8, 2012 - 10:32 am
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Steve, the RSS feed is toobigtoknow.com/feed/rss2/
I’ll add that info to the home page. Thanks for the reminder!
#6 by steve felix on January 8, 2012 - 5:38 pm
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My pleasure David.
#7 by Dan Pontefract on January 17, 2012 - 1:40 am
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Just downloaded … am looking forward to sinking my digital teeth into it.
Jarvis’ review was splendid.
When speaking, I often state, “I store my knowledge in my network.”