David Weinberger Quotes

David Weinberger offers witty musings on media, technology and society that make everyday data feel like hidden treasure.

15 quotes

  1. The Internet is a medium only at the bit level. At the human level, it is a conversation that, because of the persistence and linkedness of pages, has elements of a world. It could only be a medium if we absolutely didn't care about it.

  2. The cure to information overload is more information. [1]

  3. To a collector of curios, the dust is metadata.' in Everything is Miscellaneous p. 233

  4. Business is a conversation because the defining work of business is conversation.

  5. The degree to which campaigns have become dominated by marketing is breaking the spirit of democracy, and we're all just so sick of it, across party lines.

  6. Knowledge is now accepted as the best we humans can do at the moment, but with the hope that we will turn out to be wrong - and thus to advance our knowledge. What's happening to networked knowledge seems to make it much closer to the scientific idea of what knowledge is.

  7. We've organized ourselves as cultures, to a large degree, around what we agree we know. And when you have multiple ways of knowing, multiple ways of organizing, the society loses one of its deepest organizational principles.

  8. If explicit metadata is a real problem, it raises problems that just can't be solved. It's not that we're not good at it; it's the problems cannot be solved because we're not going to agree about these deep questions of how we organize.

  9. Personalization is the automatic tailoring of sites and messages to the individuals viewing them, so that we can feel that somewhere there's a piece of software that loves us for who we are.

  10. Business is a conversation because the defining work of business is conversation - literally. And 'knowledge workers' are simply those people whose job consists of having interesting conversations.

  11. Metadata liberates us, liberates knowledge.

  12. The next darwin is more likely to be a data wonk than a naturalist wandering through an exotic landscape.

  13. This is an awesome time to be a knowledge seeker, no better time, but it's also the best time in history to be a complete idiot.

  14. Knowledge in the Internet Age - networked knowledge - is becoming more like what knowledge has been in the past few hundreds years for scientists: it's provisional; it's a hypothesis that is waiting to be disproved.

  15. How we organize our world reflects not only the world but also our interests, our passions, our needs, our dreams.