1/24: David Weinberger: Too Big to Know @ Harvard
January 14th, 2012(Forgive me, but I appreciate the humor in Too Big to Know at Harvard.)
David Weinberger, an appreciator of librarians and information science and prolific author and thinker on related topics, will speak about his new book Too Big to Know on Tuesday, January 24, most likely somewhere at Harvard University. The Berkman Center’s page indicates the location will be announced the day before the talk to folks who RSVP (via that page).
Their summary of his talk:
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. Now networked knowledge is taking on the properties of its new medium: never being settled, including disagreement within itself, and becoming not a set of stopping points but a web of temptations. Networked knowledge, for all its strengths, has its own set of problems. But, in knowledge’s new nature there is perhaps a hint about why the Net has such surprising transformative power.
Addendum 01/19/12: The location of this RSVP-required talk is Austin North Classroom, Austin Hall, Harvard Law School.
Addendum 1/24: “Unsettling Knowledge” is the title on David’s intro slide. I can’t wait to learn what’s unsettling about it! There’s a webcast link somewhere, probably on Berkman’s site. And David’s offering to sign anything we want him to after the talk. Well, ok, almost anything …
