"Knowledge now is the unshaped web of connections within which expressions of ideas live." page 118;
"paper based citations... nails" "hyperlinks...invitations" page 113
"Network decision-making" pages 168-171 "scales better" "excels when decisions require a great deal of local knowledge" "motivate people" "more local knowledge can be applied" makes me wonder if the world of education could be improved with that strategy instead of the top down decisions made by politicians, implemented at the state level and then shoved on down the hierarchy to the LEAs. ( )

No great discoveries here, but a consistently interesting look at the impact of the internet on knowledge. ( )

I wasn't terribly impressed by this book, although it may have been due to the fact that I've read a number of books about information and knowledge over the past few years, many of which he cites. ( )

I finished this on the plane heading into LA. I really, really enjoyed reading the book, but it is going to take me quite a bit of time to unpack it. I was surprised that its reviews were so mixed. It did not suffer from the flaws attributed to it, I thought. Instead, I think the reviewers were expecting it to put forward a particular kind of argument that Weinberger declined (wisely, IMHO) to engage in.

Epistemologically speaking, Weinberger just assumes that the critiques raised by continental thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault have been shown to be justified. His critics seem to want him to rehash and re-argue these critiques. Instead of doing this, Weinberger points to new ways data is being stored and new ways that people are creating knowledge out of these data as examples of how these critiques do a better job of explaining knowledge in today's contexts than do uncritical correspondence theories of truth or the idea that science is a mirror of nature. (I can see how readers who do not share an enthusiasm for continental philosophy and Pragmatism might find this assumption abrupt, but I would have found yet another rehash of that argument tedious and unnecessary.)

I've too much to say to put into this Goodreads review, but I hope to have a more thorough one up at informationgames.info in the near future. ( )

An easy read about the new nature of knowing in the hyperlinked age, but none of the conclusions are very profound. I did like some of the examples and especially the advocacy of open access publishing and publishing unfiltered "rough drafts" in science. ( )