Too Big to Know: David Weinberger on Scalable Knowledge

TOO BIG TO KNOWDavid Weinberger, Berkman Center and Harvard Law School Library Innovation LabTuesday, January 24, 6:00PMHarvard Law SchoolRSVP required for those attending in personCo-sponsored by the Harvard Law School Library and the Office of the Senior Associate Provost at Harvard UniversityReception to follow

David Weinberger is the author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined and Everything Is Miscellaneous, and is the co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto. Holder of a Ph.D. in philosophy, he’s a senior researcher and an animating spirit at the Berkman Center. His current book, Too Big to Know, is about the Internet’s effect on how and what we know—

We used to know how to know. Get some experts, maybe a methodology, add some criteria and credentials, publish the results, and you get knowledge we can all rely on. But as knowledge is absorbed by our new digital medium, it’s becoming clear that the fundamentals of knowledge are not properties of knowledge but of its old paper medium. Indeed, the basic strategies of knowledge that emerged in the West addressed a basic problem: skulls don’t scale. But the Net does.

David will be speaking about the book at Harvard Law School on Tuesday the 24th of January at 6 PM, at an event featuring historian Ann Blair, senior associate provost for Harvard Library Mary Lee Kennedy, and MIT Center for Civic Media director Ethan Zuckerman. See the event page for further information and to RSVP online.