Fragments of the Web

So I'm reading David Weinberger's Small Pieces Loosely Joined, and I highly recommend it to anyone even remotely curious about how the Web is affecting (and being affected by) our society - from our daily information snarfing habits to large-scale collaborative projects like Wikipedia.

He has made me think about the Web from new and startling angles, and that has actually made a lot of the 'weird' stuff we do online start to make a twisted kind of sense. For example, why do we jump from page to page like addled kangaroos? Why do we trust online forums teeming with advice from unqualified strangers? (No, we're not just stupid/overly trusting). What is so appealing about the messy, chaotic nature of the Internet, and aren't we better off just putting the whole thing under centralized government control? (Hint: The Web works because it's a mess, and trying to streamline everything under a centralized process would cause stagnation and death - basically a shot to the heart of the freedom that the Web needs to survive).

It's beautifully written, clear and engaging without being patronizing, and Weinberger weaves together a rich variety of aspects of the Web, from the gritty hardware task of actually 'moving bits' to the abstract philosophical implications of a traditional separation of 'inner' and 'outer' worlds (and also 'subjective' and 'objective' knowledge).

I'm getting so interested just writing about this now that I'm going to try and finish off the book -- in particular, I've been caught up in Weinberger's musings on how we process information in terms of applications for designing new virtual user interfaces for the library. It looks like we're far more 'bodily' oriented in how we learn the world than we realize -- that typical 'consciousness trapped in a physical limiting shell' view of the mind/body split doesn't take into account how much we use our bodies to interact with our environments and, therefore, learn things. We build models to visualize abstract concepts, we draw on backboards with chalk -- just think of how much people automatically love to 'fiddle' with new gadgets at the presentation booths. I'm pretty sure everyone who saw that scene in Minority Report with Tom Cruise 'conducting' a series of photos, videos, and documents with graceful sweeps and twists of his hands immediately thought, "Cool! I want to try!"

Wouldn't it be awesome if libraries could be that fun and immersive?