Too Big to Know: How the new dimensions of information are transforming business — and life (David Weinberger)

Summary: We used to know how to know things. That’s how we guided our businesses, our government, our daily lives. But now there is so much to know and so much conflicting advice to listen to. It seems like everyone’s an expert, and no one agrees with anyone else. This looks like a problem, but it actually can be a source of tremendous strength. It turns out that our old system of knowledge was based around the limitations of paper, a disconnected, expensive medium that managed a world that was too big to know by cutting down on what we had to deal with. There were of course advantages to that, but they came at the cost of throwing out most of what the world was trying to tell us. In the new knowledge ecology, knowledge takes on the properties of its new medium, the Net. That means knowledge has become huge, it's connected, and it embraces disagreement and differences. The key is to think about knowledge not as a set of content but as a network: the smartest person in the room is now the room itself. Then the question is, how can you build, maintain, and nurture a smart network?