Too Big to Know

An Introduction to the Rest of the Book

THE BIBLE’S ABRAHAM, in a land of idol worshippers, thought knowledge is what you see beyond what is before your eyes. The Athenians thought it was an opinion that is true and that we have good reason to believe. Descartes thought it was that which you could not under any imaginable circumstances be wrong about. Scientists have thought it is that which well-designed, repeatable experiments enable us to have confidence in. There is no shortage of definitions of knowledge. And there is no overall agreement.

But there have been a few characteristics of knowledge that have persisted throughout the ages in the West: First, knowledge is a subset of belief. We believe many things, but only some of them are knowledge.

Second, knowledge consists of beliefs that we have some good reason to believe, whether it’s because we’ve done experiments, because we’ve proved them logically, or because God revealed them to our people.

Third, knowledge consists of a body of truths that together express the truth of the world.

The first two are affected by the networking of knowledge. The third is being erased. We are losing knowledge’s body: a comprehensible, masterable collection of ideas and works that together reflect the truth about the world. In field after field we’ve witnessed the idea of a “canon” falling. The idea that there is such a thing as “the news” that could possibly fit into a daily newspaper or newscast, that there are agreed-upon Great Works of Literature that make one literate, that there’s a reasonable way to pare an encyclopedia down to a mere 65,000 entries, that we even know what constitutes a civilization—all of these notions have been under attack for a couple of generations now. The Internet is sealing the deal.

On the one hand, we’ll miss knowledge’s body. We like picturing knowledge as a collection of truths that have made it past wise custodians. The collection—iconically, a library—is always growing as we learn more and more. We learn from it and, perhaps, our own work will add to it.

On the other hand, day to day, we won’t much miss it. We’ll still have the sort of knowledge that lets us operate in the world. Bus schedules will continue to be somewhat accurate. We’ll still have the movie reviews we rely on, whether they’re in printed newspapers or blogs. We’ll still have the facts that we take for granted—two plus two equals four, Albany is the capital of New York—and that sort of knowledge will be easier to find than ever. Marketers will still claim that a shirt is “as soft as a monsoon breeze” and we’ll know that the shirt is not quite as soft as that. What’s at issue is Knowledge with a capital K, the sort of tested, authorized truths that get carefully placed in the Pantheon of Knowledge, whether they are the principles of science, the broad “irrefutable” generalizations about the nature and aims of human life, or the foundational framing of how the pieces go together. Truths will remain true, but we are losing the sense that we know how to build a Pantheon that is certain, consistent, agreed upon, and much smaller than the universe itself.

So, imagine for a moment that we give up on the idea that we could ever figure out which carefully selected statements are so beyond dispute and so important that they ought to be admitted into the Big Book of Human Knowledge. We would still have knowledge as an important type of belief, one that we have some reason to believe is very likely true. We would still be able to sort through ideas, assigning them various degrees of credibility, from the axiomatic certainty that two plus two does equal four, to the demonstrable truth that boiling water breaks the bond between hydrogen and oxygen, to the actionable likelihood that cheating on taxes will get you in trouble, to the arguable hypothesis that asking companies to be nice will slow global climate change. We’ll still have facts. We’ll still have experts. We’ll still have academic journals. We’ll have everything except knowledge as a body. That is, we’ll have everything except what we’ve thought of as knowledge. What would we miss?

This is not a mere thought experiment. It is what the Internet is doing to knowledge. The Internet simply doesn’t have what it takes to create a body of knowledge: No editors and curators who get to decide what is in or out. No agreed-upon walls to let us know that knowledge begins here, while outside uncertainty reigns—at least none that everyone accepts. There is little to none of the permanence, stability, and community fealty that a body of knowledge requires and implies. The Internet is what you get when everyone is a curator and everything is linked.

Traditional knowledge is what you get when paper is its medium. There is nothing mystical about this. For example, if your medium doesn’t easily allow you to correct mistakes, knowledge will tend to be carefully vetted. If it’s expensive to publish, then you will create mechanisms that winnow out contenders. If you’re publishing on paper, you will create centralized locations where you amass books. The property of knowledge as a body of vetted works comes directly from the properties of paper. Traditional knowledge has been an accident of paper.

In the remainder of this book we will follow a train of thought that begins with the hypothesis—for which there is increasing evidence—that in a networked world, knowledge lives not in books or in heads but in the network itself. It’s not that the network is a super-brain or is going to become conscious. It’s not.^a Rather, the Internet enables groups to develop ideas further than any individual could. This moves knowledge from individual heads to the networking of the group. We still need to get maximum shared benefit from smart, knowledgeable individuals, but we do so by networking them. Chapter 4 is on the networking of expertise.

But the Internet by its nature contains much diversity and many, many disagreements. We need to explore how to know in a world where people don’t—and won’t—agree about anything. Chapter 5 is on the importance and limits of diversity.

Hyperlinks challenge the traditional way of putting ideas together in a page-turning sequence. Yet we still need to put ideas together in ways that lead us to conclusions. Chapter 6 is on long-form thinking (books) versus hyperlinked webs.

Then we put these ideas to the test by looking at two areas where it seems that knowledge has to settle down, shake off the constant disagreements and bickering on the Net, and get real. Chapter 7 looks at science in the Age of the Net. How is our most reality-based discipline managing in the new linked chaos?

Then we look at what happens to knowledge when it has to guide action. Chapter 8 is on decision-making and leadership in a networked world.

Finally, we inevitably want to know if the networking of knowledge is a good thing or a bad thing. The terms of the question may be terribly ill-defined, but we still want it answered. Chapter 9 is about what we have to do to make the network a better infrastructure for knowledge.

All of these chapters explore doing the job of knowing now that the limitations of knowledge’s old medium are lifting. Even if the smartest person in the room is the room itself, the room does not magically make all who enter it smart. We need to understand what of the old is worth holding on to, and what limitations of the new technology are going to trap and tempt us. A new strategy for knowing our world is emerging, but we are not passive in its arrival.