David Weinberger and Andrew Keen

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back this morning, we have a very exciting day of Picnic today. Then any day we will get around this room to listen to some of the best minds and best thinkers and the best creators of this year. First of all we are starting with the big debates. Yesterday we talks a lot about the very personal, and today we are looking further head into the world, what are the personal meaning in the world and also we are looking further ahead in the field of technology, so this morning we also have a very interesting technology session. The first opening session will be led by someone who is as he him selves put in a expert in life journalism, Walt Mossberg, the Personal Technology Columnist of the Wall Street Journal. And also the organizer of the AllThingsD conference. He is the man that with one sentence can kill a company or build it. His verdict on what is important and interesting in the world of technology is something that a lot of people look up to him and are interesting in. He has come to lead the debate, and he has come to introduce our speaker. So please welcome Walt Mossberg. Good morning, thanks for getting up so early and being here. I think you will enjoy and learn from the session we are about to have because its really it really gets to one of the key key issues surrounding the total change in the world of scholarship and media and community that is caused by what I referred to as the digital tidal wave, there is a digital tidal wave in the world then it changes every every walk of life, every aspect of society, every part of the economy. And the question that we are going to be dealing with in the next session is how can we tell who has authority? Is it the whole world, is it the small group of people that we have considered to be experts or authorities whether in academia or journalism or entertainment, and we have two really excellent intelligent speakers who come with this from different points of view. David Weinberger and Andrew Keen and we are going to start with David this morning. David is a fellow at the Berkman Center at Harvard, and the author of "Everything Is Miscellaneous" and he is going to give us a presentation which represents his point of view on this matter. And then we are going to sit down and have a discussion with David and Andrew Keen the author of "The Cult of the Amateur" who has quite a very different point of view, and I will be responding to David and we will go back and forth and hopefully it will shed some light on the topic. So let me start by introducing David Weinberger. Thank you Walt So that was on purpose, I wasn't exactly sure, so thank you and thank you person for introduction. So that was a book plug. We were very good at organizing things, we have a lot of experience over the course of our culture figuring out how to organize complex ideas and and goods. And so we come up with organizational schemes, this is one type that is complex everything is neat and orderly, everything has its place but there is always one box whether its on the organization chart or its in your kitchen which is for the miscellaneous, where you put the things that don't fit into the categories that you created, nothing wrong with that the normal miscellaneous box that have things that are unlike everything else, and unlike the things next to them. Well if the box gets too big then we think that we have to fix our organizational scheme, that it's not right. What I want to suggest today is that in fact digitally allowing that box to grow is to take over the the organization is in fact frequently exactly the right thing to do in part - because you can maintain the old organizations as one of the ways through the box, with the miscellaneous as I am talking about, it is different from the miscellaneous in the normal sense of the term, when we when you come in you may notice the fifteen million jigsaw pieces piled up, that's a type of the miscellaneous pile, buts that not what would I have in mind. In - the sort of digital miscellaneous pile that we are building for ourselves there are way more than 15 million pieces, but they are all different and they are not all of the same value. They are not alike, and the tasks of the digital age the one that we have been engaged in since the web began is to find ways to help us discover what's of worth, what's of values, what's of interests to us. Different things to different people but not all the pieces are of equal value, so how do we find and discover and relate the pieces, and that's where we been up to when you when you create - when we create this digital pile together, its permission free, the web only was able to scale because it was designed from the beginning not to require or to ask permission to read, to post, to build new applications for new businesses, that's the only reason the web is been able to get is big and is important as its been but when you do that that means that's there is more of everything on the web, there is more art, there is more there is more porn, there is more love there is more hate, there is more intelligent analysis, there is more utter foolishness, there are more amateurs, and there are more experts, even though those two things are not actually opposites, nevertheless there is more of it there there is more of everything. And so the task is to find what's the value and to use and to use and to make sense passing through this pile in a way that make sense to us and the ways it is useful to us. We are steered wrong by our experience organizing the real world, because the fundamental principle in the real world of organizing physical things, the real world's main purpose seems to be to keep things apart, because that's how atoms work. In the real world everything to be in a place one place, there is only way of organizing things at a time, and no matter how much you may want to get two things into the same place at the same time, you simply cannot do it in the real world. You can try as hard as you want is just not going to happen, and that's - an important principle for the real world, but it's exactly the wrong principle for the digital world. We are very good in organizing, we have a lot of experience organizing physical things, we have to, so we do it with our merchandise and stores, and we do it in our educational system with students and books and with knowledge, and we do it in science all the time. We have a science of taxonomy that helps us organize and separate into bins and boxes, it's all really important in the real world that we do that. But there is a price, so when you start to organize ideas on to physical medium of paper, immediately a power relationship emerges, it has to because there is only one piece of paper, there is one newspaper, that is one square meter less than that, a front page and somebody has to figure out we way its going to be organizing organized, what's going on it? What's going to be on the front page? Where it is going to be on the front page? And so we have editors, who make excellent decisions because they are highly trained and they are dedicated to the task. So they make really good decisions, usually but they are still making a decision. Occasionally they go wrong, they are still making a decision deciding because they have to what's of interest important to us but in fact there is no single set of things that's interesting and important to everyone, because we have different interests. But in the physical world when we are dealing with ideas physically, we have to treat them like the shoes in the department store. And that's an unfortunate has been an unfortunate requirement in fact we have internalized it. We have thought in the in western cultures since the Greeks we have assumed that ideas are organized the way the real world is. So Plato said in the Phaedrus that the wise person carves nature at its joints he is thinking about carving up an animal. And obviously if you want to cut want to cut the animal at the joints not in the middle of bone which implies that nature has joints, it has a way of being organized just like that there are real joints of an animal. You can't really argue about that. Well that's not exactly the case however, and generally we are modern, we don't fully believe that nevertheless we have scientists who an year ago last summer in Prague at the International Astronomical Union Meeting, we are having a vote trying to come up with a definition of the planets with the intent of saying there are billions of things circling the sun. There are nine that we care about especially, why do we care about them especially, because we do. It is very interesting to us, we have a tradition. We have myths so we came up with a definition that would find the attributes that those nine have in common and only those nine. And so they did but the definitions that they came up with were arbitrary and some what meaningless, big round objects, who cares. There are lot and lots of ways of slicing up the universe and the slicing up the solar system and how we do it depends upon what the attributes of the and the properties the things circling the sun and what we are interested in so you might say I am really interested in big round things why I don't know I just am or you might say I am interested in objects that have atmospheres because I am studying weather and suddenly you don't get the nine planets you get another set of object I am interested in things that have water, bodies that have water because I am interested in the possibility of life and then you get five objects one of which is not a planet. You may say I am interested in objects that are racing towards the earth and will hit it that's the interesting attribute, that's an interesting way of categorizing things big round objects not all that interesting in fact the number of attributes of different properties each of which is a joint is close to its indefinite there are so many we cant even count. So to Plato the world look like this the animal with places you can call but in fact its much more like this you have each of those there are so many properties and attributes of things each of those is a way that we can cluster and organize and categorize and how we do so depends upon our interests in our project, that doesn't mean that we can organize things anyway we want. Umberto Eco the novelist and academic philosopher says there are many ways of slicing the pig but there is no slice there is no cut of pig that's nose tailed, universe just doesn't go that together that way. Nevertheless there are so many ways that you think there is a single order of the universe is just to mistake the universe for a shoe store. We do this in part because the medium we use for preserving and communicating information and ideas knowledge had been physical its been books but now we are digitizing everything we are getting away from the authority that comes immediately to the limitations of paper. So I think it is useful to think about them being three orders of organizations, three orders of order, two of them are traditional the third is new and the first order, you organize the things themselves, so this is the Bettman archive in the United States which is an archive of photographs and in the first order you organized the photos themselves, you picked one way of organizing because they are atoms and that's all you can do. In the second order is physically separate the metadata you know the information about the information you physically separated in a traditional form you might put into a card catalogue and that works very well because you can have now may be three different ways of organizing author subject title, but in order to do that you have to shrink the information down to what fits on a three by five card. So these are if this is a library you are taking a book and you are shrinking it to what fits on a small card the card this big. So that's a price you pay but obviously its worth it, I am very good at organizing that way. In the third order everything is digital the contents are digital the information about the contents are digital and that means we have to come up with new principles the old principles for organizing the first and second order don't work they are way too limited. So I want quickly point to four principles of change and then talk about five implications of that for how we think about of things. The first principle of changes is that in the real world we have a real world store and you get a new digital camera and you put it on one shelf and you have to make that choice, one shelf if its an online store you file your camera under as many different categories as you can because it enables people to find it and everybody is happy you are selling more cameras and people are getting what they want. So you do this in its impossible in a real world to file into into multiple branches. Which means by the way that you make a mess, that real world messes are terrible because there is no principle of organization so you cannot find anything, online messiness actually has a lot of virtues, for example if you post something online and there are so many links to it and links to the links to the links and links to the links, you cant even follow it. Your post was a huge success. That's a great thing because each of those links - each of those messy links adds value, adds information, adds another opinion and that consideration. Messiness is really good online because we can sort through it using computers we can add metadata levels on top of the mess, multiple levels that sort through it for in ways that are useful to us. The third thing that changes are that we are very used to the idea actually brought a prop of me. In the real world we understand immediately the difference between metadata and data. We do not confuse the label with the thing. We now understand the difference between the label on a folder that was a high value prop I would like that. We understand we understand the different between of label on the folder and the contents of the folder but online it gets a little get a real mess here. So if you remember an author but you can't remember what book he wrote. You will go to a search site and say Herman Melville you press that button and now you will get back not just the author's name but because everything is going online almost everything. You will get that the contents of the books you will get back the contents of Moby Dick because of that content is online you can also now say I remember a bit of the content or that may be the first line its Call me Ishmael what who wrote that what book is that from so you put that in the search engine and it will come back with the author what this means that that there is no longer any formal difference between metadata and data. Metadata now is what you know and data is what you are looking for what you don't know. The reason this is important is that we use metadata as a lever to prior up knowledge and if everything is metadata our species just got way smarter. And the fourth principle that changes is that if you go to a real world store clothing store. The rational thing to do is that take your shopping cart and to pull of the clothing that fits you everything in your size since make a big pile because the rest of the store is just noise, is just a distraction. If you do that the rational thing will be thrown out instantly as soon as I catch you then throw you out, they wont let you you back in because the owners of the stuff in the real world also own the organization of that stuff. But if you go online and there this online store insists they make you look at stuff that's not your size not your color too expensive the wrong season, whatever. You will leave instantly you will leave in 15 seconds as you should because online the users or the information own the organization of it control the organization in all that increasingly and that's as it should be. That one of point quickly the two ways that we are doing that just a being little bit clear about at first is faceted classification. This is a just a good electronic store online if you want to search for you want a digital camera you click on digital cameras they will show you on the left there the order of the cameras that they want you to see. That's fine they can, their site, they can do that but on the other side on the right they will give you a faceted classification browsing tool. What faceted classification does is allow a user to browse for a tree - - a hierarchal tree, which is a very powerful and useful way of browsing, but in traditional trees the organizers of the tree decide what to root is and then what your next set of choices are and what the next set of choices are with a faceted system the user decides that. So user one one user might come and say well what matters to me is I don't want to pay more than $200, click and that will show on all the under 200s and what matters to me at least three mega pixels, click and I don't really care about the maker of it, but I do care about it that's so you click through the tree or wait in the next moment somebody else or you again says you know, what I really want an Nikon I don't care how much it cost where now Nikon is root of the tree. So you get the benefit of browsing in this very familiar powerful way, but the user decides what we order is. And the second a second way that we are doing this, taking control of the organization of information is from tagging which I know is familiar to to many of you but I will be fast so this is del.icio.us which in many ways started the current interest in tagging, if you are Katrina in this example you got to have a page for free at del.icio.us where you can list pages on the web that you want to remember, and book mark that. And so when you book mark a new page del.icio.us will ask you to supply a word or two or three tags that to help remember them and find those that page again so you might give though anything you want. Well so now when it just you can see on the left I am not going to left and right. So on the left side there, is the tag cloud that is the list of all the tags that Katrina has used with the size of the font indicating how many times she used them. If she now wants to re-find all the page to see tags say design she clicks on that and now she sees those pages. It's very convenient. It gets really powerful and interesting because at del.icio.us and many other tagging sites such as flickr, the photo site, tags are public which means that I could - Katrina can see all the pages sees tag design - has tagged design but all of us can see all the pages, everybody at del.icio.us has tagged design, which is like having a world do research for you. And as you subscribe to the tag design, you get an rss feed you will start to notice that some people are finding and tagging pages that are really useful and interesting. Apparently you share interest may be you check there tag cloud at del.icio.us may be you realize that you had shared interest and you and you will start to correspond and you fall in love when you get married and you have tag based babies. Tagging is a direct expression of what our interests are. It's by the way an implicit expression of that, we don't tag things in order to be noticed we tag things to find things but and so doing we implicitly express a lot about ourselves and I am going to come back to the implicit the moment. So it seems to me that we are going from a time when we thought because we had to that we will organize the world by giving it to experts, who will prune the world who will who will exclude what is of no values so we wont be bothered with it and who will shape it so that it nicely ordered and organized and we can find things which is exactly what we need experts to do especially in a paper based world where there is where its expensive to publish but in a world of abundance that no longer is the only right strategy. Instead I think what we are doing as in lets take the leaves off of the trees make a hug pile a miscellaneous pile but a miscellaneous pile that that is rich with metadata and rich with connections and super saturated with meaning. So and in this pile we will include every thing, because why its its more expensive to exclude and it is to include and stuff that you are excluding if the article about Paris Hilton which is clearly trivia may turn out, almost certainly will turn out in ten years there will be somebody a graduate dissertation on their media's treatment of celebrity woman in the early 2000s. You have excluded that the point is we cannot predict what other people are going to be interested in. Humans are too twisty, we are too we are too surprising. We don't know what our interest are and now we don't have to decide that for others and in the same way we can postpone the moment when we organize this information until the very moment when a user needs something, when a user has a particular request we can let her decide how she wants to organize it now. Give her the tools to do that. We have the tools so include and postpone, which is radically different then the regime that we have been under that is been based upon the limitations of the real. So one of the consequences of this sort of we inverse of this is that if its good to make this piles is I think it frequently it is that one of reason that is good to make this piles by the way is that the old ideas of the of the experts how they have what they think is of interest and how its organized that's present in the pile to that's still available to us. The way that the editors of the New York Times to the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal have organized the paper it's still available to us. This is an additive process it's not an exclusive one. So the inverse of this is well a frequent term that to be frequently useful for businesses to add their information to that pile even though we have been telling businesses for a generation that information is their second most important asset after their people and what to do with asset you protect them you guard them, you lock with lock them up. But it turns out in many in industry after industry its better for the business to let that information go where get smashed up with other information and it gets added value. So the airlines discovered this early on, if they just say let there their fare information and their scheduling information out in to the world so that sites like Travelocity and Expedia and Orbitz can aggregate that information, that information as added value and then you take that information, that aggregated information and you edit at at forecast or kayak to information about the curve of fares overtime or travel information or customer reviews and it has even more value and it all points back to the airlines. So by letting the information go your head you are allowing it to accrue value. It's not true in every industry in every instance by any means but it is in many in it surprising. I call this Meta business nobody else does, nobody else will. This is not going to catch on. So some implications the first is that we were coming out of the time generations, a hundred years of broadcast of mass media where the economics and physics over there required that very few people got to speak and rest of us got to listen, and in that regime the economics often dictate you succeed by reaching the widest range of people which you do by making the simplest in many ways stupidest content possible. Mass market, lowest common denominator and so we have being treated like idiots for generations now and its true not just in the media it's also certainly true in politics. So I then very sorry about this, but President Bush although a year and a few months ago had a speech on immigration which is an enormously complex topic in every country and certainly in America, and we know that his speech writer said what speech writers always say the politicians which is keep it simple, keep it simple. This is a huge complex topic 2400 words which is about three newspaper columns. He gave a speech and within a few hours they were over 2400 blog posts, and you know what the bloggers were doing and besides disagreeing within they were finding stuff in the simple, simple document and making it more complex there is you know there is sort of holding at hand here. Look at the bottom of you say you notice these changes positions since he was governor of Texas? Did you notice that this republican over here governor of California disagrees with the republican party I wonder what effect this will have on the NAFTA treaty that's what bloggers do. They take what simple and they find - they make more it complex because that's what humans do when we talk, when we have conversation that's what conversation primarily is about is making the world that more complex and by the way making it more interesting, that little secret to the broadcast regime has kept from us is that the world is way more interesting that we were led to believe, and you know this by looking at the blogosphere. We can see that interest expressed. Bloggers make things more complex because that's what humans do and that's one of the reasons why we have rushed into a blogging, we can't wait to continue to have these conversations. Well part of the this is the second implication and part of the regime of simplicity is being also a regime of explicitness which computers have not help computers are wonderful it handling explicit information not particularly well designed for handling implicit. But we implicit as we are all the real meaning and juice of life is. So a couple of years ago I live in Boston I was on a gas station had a new type of pump - gas pump. This is completely flat, it is all rubberized plastic and there are no buttons. So the start label there is actually the button, but you know, buttons have important metadata, they are raised, they raise it the raised nature of buttons as you can now make me flat push me make me flat and that's how we know there buttons with this one too modern didn't have any raises, so people didn't know how to start it. So the gas station printed a blue sign and it says "Press start button" arrow arrow arrow okay here is the rest of the photographs. Now there are two possible lessons from this. One is that humans are just so stupid we shouldn't be on the planet. The thought that I think if wrong lesson from this so, I think the actual lesson is that we are really we are so good at metadata and it handling the implicit and the explicit, that when we go wrong when we get confused between the implicit and the explicit, it's actually funny. So we read a newspaper loaded with metadata, we have never being trained on this metadata, but we can tell we know the bigger they headline that more important, we can tell the difference between the article and the byline that says who wrote it. We just were great at metadata we sometimes go wrong especially when the implicit and explicit goes wrong. So here is here is another picture. This is of two of our children from all a while ago, and its as all families are, our family photos are, it's loaded with implicit metadata. Just tones of that and you can see some on the surface, you maybe right or wrong. But you know you you can sense some of what's going on may be. If you would ask me about my children that that is ask me to please be explicit about my children, explain them to you I will fail utterly just as you would. I could say some things, how old they are whether go to school, but I can't tell you I can I am not a good enough writer to be able to tell you about my children in a way that would actually touch what's important about that relate because that's implicit. And its humans are not computers, we are not databases, you can't press a button and have us suddenly make explicit everything that's implicit. There en first of all, there is some violence in the act of making explicit frequently. Second of all, the implicit is this mass of relationships that are soft edged and ambiguous and and unknown and we can just simply can not surface them. Some people are better than others are doing poets are good at doing it, but they do so primarily by by raising the explicit into the implicit again and leaving it implicit. I mean it's all a mystery, how we do this at all. Nevertheless, if we were to go to a social networking site, my son has friended me at Facebook. And when you get friended, this is what you are shown. These are the relationships that are possible and one of them is in my family and yes, he is my child. Excellent, explicit information, so one might conclude from this that therefore social networks are crappy because they require us to make explicit fact which should be left implicit. I think again, that would be the wrong conclusion because having given this explicit information which is crappy, doesn't really save very much at all nevertheless surround it grows this mess, this useful human mess of relationships that are hugely implicit in their meaning. Facebook has been brilliant at this Facebook brilliantly has opened itself up to developers so that they can add now thousands, tens of thousands of new ways of connecting with other people and around each one grows these these dry bones of explicitness of explicitness grows human flesh, human relationships that are deep and tangling and twisty and dark and we can't fully express, that's why social networks work. That's why social networks are important. And what I just said about social networks applies absolutely to the overall social network which is the web, which is for my point of view, not primarily not primarily a publishing medium certainly has that function, but that's not that what's driving people on to what's driving people on to it is the ability to connect with other people in the dark, mysterious, implicit, twisty, ambiguous ways that we do. The ways that matter. We do this in knowledge now also and this is a challenge, it's I think it's a great thing, it's also it's also a challenge to us. This is the Mars Bar. This is the Wikipedia page about the Deep-Fried Mars Bar, which apparently is a treat in the southern portion of my country. I have never heard of it, nevertheless, I believe that in fact is a treat because in part because there is a discussion page and on the discussion page, we see in fact how people came to this conclusion. Wikipedia is dedicated to neutrality, so people would disagree on discussion page; try to work out a way that they all agree. I want to ask Jimmy Wales the founder of Wikipedia. I started asking him about neutrality, saying you know there is no such thing as the neutral point of view and he politely, he is a very he is very polite, nice fellow, cut me off and said, you know, I am not all that interested in French philosophy. He says "to me a page is neutral when people have stopped arguing over it". This thing is actually not a bad operational definition of neutrality. So these arguments occur on the discussion pages, such as this one which by the way, you probably can't say but in fact answers from a Duchy sorry I am just reading one of your your fellow country people who claims that he has seen Deep-Fried Mars Bars in the Netherlands as well. Oh the shame of it. So I want to imagine that this this trivial example there are three people who contributed to it, thus to keep things simple. So it's my example, so I got to say, this person is the world's leading authority on Deep-Fried Mars Bars. Here wrote the original article, he is the real expert, he got it right. Next person comes along and changes it, fixes it a little bit. First person reverts, he says, I am the world's greatest expert, you can't change I am going to change it back, so he does. Third person comes along, fixes it. First person says, okay, I understand. I get Wikipedia, I am the world's greatest expert, you are not, you are making my piece worse, I am going to leave, which is completely his or her of course you can do that. And so doing, he is making himself a little lesser relevant, but that's okay and we hope that when he leaves, he goes to his own website where he writes the truth about Deep-Fried Mars Bars because we want that online, we need that expertise online. Wikipedia isn't everything, it's just an encyclopedia. So off he goes. And so the the expert who is unwilling to engage in conversation, in the give and take of conversation is losing relevancy. This is what I believe, the New York Times decided last week when it it decided would no longer require us to pay to read their columnist. They made some money doing this, but the columnist were becoming less relevant, because they were not involved in the conversation. Conversational knowledge, social knowledge they are weaknesses to it, they are dangerous to it but it does have some advantages because conversation has always helped to drive bugs out of knowledge. Knowledge has always been social. And so in a good conversation, not all from a Wikipedia are you know good one the expert's opinion and views and knowledge gets better for it. this is not just true Wikipedia though, this is not simply the socializing of knowledge, it's not simply a Wikipedian saying it's also happens on every mailing lists that you are on just above it. I have been on the on the mailing lists for years about internet policy, about which I know very little but there are people on there who knows so much, there is a guy named Harold who when ever there is a ruling from the government or policy, he is writing this brilliant long analysis of it, very precise and clear and I can tell from the reactions of the other people on the list that he really knows what he is talking about. Nevertheless, they will challenge him; they will add to it, they will suggest other things. The result is that as smart as Harold who ever Harold is as smart as Harold is as an expert, the mailing list itself, now I mean this literally. The mailing list itself is smarter than Harold. The knowledge that is the mailing list, that occurs on the mailing list is smarter than and better knowledge than that of any one individual. I would rather be on the mailing list than than be on Harold's own news letter subscription. That social knowledge, it's nothing new which what we have always done, it's only the isolated genius who who sits in the corner and thinks that he or she is going to understand the world by closing his eyes and not talking to anyone. That's also a type of insanity, but it is also a type of genius. The rest of us learn and know by talking with people and that's what the web does brilliantly. Same sort of thing, socializing of knowledge is happening for a better or for worse in newspaper editorial rooms, or we are used to the page front page being decided upon by editors and now there are sites like Digg where the readers get to decide what's important and how important it is. This is right at it's infancy Digg is useful but not not wonderful in my in my opinion, we will get better at this, enabling people to filter ideas and information, find what's relevant and important by consulting their social network and by consulting experts and authorities who they may not know personally. USA today has in fact added an element of this by allowing us to vote thumbs up on articles. Unfortunately, they do not allow us to vote thumbs down which is what we really want to do when the lead article is is what's his name what's his name the singer Justin Timberlake getting slimmed to the kid's event. There is nothing more than I want to do and say, no - get that off the front page you morons, they won't let us do that. In Digg, you can go down, so USA today, is just slightly afraid of its readers but nevertheless, as I think an interesting move in the right direction and the socializing knowledge is happening in schools whether you like it or not. If you are in an affluent community in America or in any community in the Netherlands your kids are online which means when they are doing their homework, they are also doing instant messaging, which means they are talking about what kids talk about plus their homework. They are saying, what did you get for question number four, what did the teacher mean by that or can't mean that. They are learning together which is exactly what we want, that's what we do, that's how we do our homework, we do it together and when we don't we are probably going wrong. We have always been social learners. But the schools are still structured to test them like this. It's complete blindness to what's happening and how learning works. And the the disconnects in the schools now at least in the United States is severe. We if we open up Britannica the great encyclopedia Britannica the greatest encyclopedia in the English language, you will you are right to believe what you read there. It's credible just by being in Britannica, but if you open up Wikipedia randomly, simply by being in Wikipedia that does not give a credibility because you may hit it at the moment that some idiot has has written false things but I do believe that Wikipedia has a great deal of credibility, I use it all the time. So the question is why? Where does it's credibility come from? And I think it's part of the socializing knowledge. So Britannica we know gets its credibility from the credentials of its authors and its editors. And the processes they go through. Right, so that's very very clear. Wikipedia does not have credentials so or credentialed authors, that has anonymous or pseudononymous authors. So where does it get it's credibility? Well in part if you know something about the topic, you can spot obvious errors, you can look at the edit history, you can look at the discussion page which is as fascinating fascinating document that by the way shows us that even though we like to think that facts are straight forward. The facts are more in play than we usually like to think. The smallest fact will be disputed. Frequently, in very learned terms, on the discussion pages of Wikipedia and we come to agreement, which is how the page gets written. Nevertheless, facts are more debatable, more controversial, then and more conversational than we frequently want to recognize. But the thing that's really interesting to me about page as like these is that there is this notice at the top that says do not believe this page. This page is not up to Wikipedia quality. Please help fix it. In fact there are well over a hundred of these notices which are like a list of ways that encyclopedias can go wrong. And if you if you find an error that isn't covered, you can make your own good Wikipedia, and you are the editor. Wikipedia encourages you to place these these notices. For example, this article appears to contradict another article, this article appears to contradict itself, doesn't seem very encyclopedic, shouldn't be here. Needs to cite sources, reads like an advertisement, reads like a sermon. And then this most important one for Wikipedia, which is it's not neutral, we have discovered some way in which may be an expert opinion is in fact biased in ways that the the expert didn't realize, because experts are human too. So the question is so it's my contention, I think it's obvious that Wikipedia is more credible because it's so willing to announce it's lack of credibility, it's human fallibility. It's made by humans. It's there to be improved that immediately tells us the metadata of that that's there the implicit there says that Wikipedia is there to help us it's on our side, it's not trying to set itself up as an authority, it just wants us to understand our world better. And so it's perfectly willing, so I am embarrassed, perfectly willing to say, this article isn't very good, and here is why not. And the question is why you will not see the equivalent of this here. Newspapers of course admit their mistakes, of course they do, but they are embarrassed them because the mistakes wear away at their authority. That's a paper based authority and increasingly, the unwillingness to be comfortable with human fallibility, I believe is going to make those authorities less credible. And the last implication that I want to talk about is the most speculative. The iffiest if you will, so this is Martin Heidegger 1927, a rotten son of a bitch, nevertheless he was right about some things. I am a Jew, it's hard to really to warm Martin Heidegger as a person. So one of the one of the things that he was really right about I think that I think was really an important idea from Heidegger, they asked what does it mean to be a simple thing, it is an ordinary thing take a hammer as the example and he is not asking a viewer from Mars, what would you think this lump of metal?. He is saying, in our culture, what does it mean to be - say a hammer. And he says, well, you know what a hammer is, you have to know what nails are. You just do, otherwise you don't really know what a hammer but to know what nails are, you have to understand how wood receives nails. But to understand wood it means you have to understand the lumber and lumber you got to understand comes from trees and you don't understand trees if you don't know they grow in forest. You have to know there is an economic system that connects the forest with the lumber you have and you have to know that the forest grows on the earth underneath the sun. So to know what the hammer is - to understand the hammer, you have to understand everything. And meaning is in fact this this context of messy references. References of all sorts of significance, this is the real semantic web. So web of language and of meaning, so one more step which is as many have pointed out, human beings are the species we seem to have succeeded to a large degree because we are able to externalize functions of consciousness. So writing externalizes memory. And book externalizes knowledge. And calculators externalize arithmetic and this is crucial to our ability to advance. So here is the the really speculate part. So I want to suggest that what we are doing now with the web, with this pile of miscellaneous stuff that we are connecting and linking in every way we can is that we are externalizing meaning. We seem to be doing this every way we can, sometimes I am purpose more often just by working on the web. We do it every time we use tags because every tag allows us to connect pieces same tag, different pieces. There is a relationship there. We can deduce relationships from tags. We can aggregate and and run computer algorithms over tags. Tags allow us to connect pieces. And we are not putting in the tags in order to connect the pieces but in so doing, in publically tagging, we are connecting the pieces and those relationships are there implicitly as potential for us to understand how our roles goes together. We do it every time we make a traditional taxonomy, which are incredibly useful and powerful ways of representing the aspects of the world. Those are there too. We don't throw them out they are there we can use them, they connect pieces. We do it every time, we do part of the semantic web, whether it's a big project or a little project, we are showing how pieces go together in a public way that we can reuse for generations we do it every time we make a playlist whether it's for music or, at Harvard there is a playlist for the books for courses. Playlists are amazingly powerful ways of of doing a layer of meaning on top of the the great potential of disorder. We do it websites like Digg and with Reddit and other such sites that allow us to say what we think is important to us, we do it with every blog post and every page we put on the web, where we take links and we explain this thing is pointed that thing and here is why I am going to give you some language to explain, that you got to go see this links blink because it's right, it's wrong, it's interesting, it's about this, it's about that, we can texualize the links. That's incredibly rich, in meaning it's a connection that's there for us to find and use over and over and over again. And we do it fundamentally with every hyperlink, the web was built the web was built to solve the problem of of messiness. We can't find what we want in the on the internet. So Tim Berners-Lee to whom we owe great thanks. Tim Berners-Lee said, "okay, if you can't find things on the internet, then lets allow people to write pages in their language using our words and make hyperlinks that are not ridiculous URLs, but are common phrases that people will understand, so that we can recommend pages to one another, we can find the order in this great mess". The web from the beginning has been about finding in this great miscellaneous pile what matters to us and why it matters to us. And so it seems to me, we are doing this. We have a generational task which is to build this infrastructure of meaning and we are doing it. And may be the most important thing about it is that it is not simply the work of experts who are valuable and who we need and who are on the web. We can find them, it is inclusive, but it's not simply the work of experts who are limited by the physical restrictions of paper, we are doing this for ourselves. This is ours, this is the great step forward out of alienation, this is our meaning, our world represented in all the ways that mattered to us. Thank you.