David Weinberger Quotations

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.

Every embarrassing moment is going to be shown on the Internet, whether the candidate likes it or not. The ones that can't deal with that are going to fail.

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.

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.

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.

Because books are written by individuals, it has often made knowledge seem like the product of individuals, even though everybody has always understood that individuals are working within the social network.

With the new medium of knowledge - the Internet - knowledge not only takes on properties of that medium but also lives at the level of the network.

The world is deterministic, but it's chaotic and emergent.

I've learned the dangerous lesson of the web: You succeed by giving up control, and that's inverse of the normal campaign.

History keeps teaching us that we can't recognize the important events that are going to trigger changes.