Knowledge in the Internet Age

"We have for a couple of millenia in the West throught of knowledge as a system of settled, consistent truths. Perhaps that exhibits the limitations of knowledge's medium more than of knowledge itself: when knowledge is communicated and preserved by writing it in permanent ink on papers, it becomes that which makes it through institutional filters and that which does not change. Yet knowledge's new medium is not a publishing system so much as a networked public. We may get lots of knowledge out of our data commons, but the knowledge is more likely to be a continuous argument as it is tugged this way and that. Indeed, that is the face of knowledge in the age of the Net: never fully settled, never fully written, never entirely done."

--David Weinberger, "The Machine That Would Predict the Future," Scientific American (December 2011), p. 57