Assignment 5B

In the article Too Big to Know David Weinberger talks about the infrastructure of knowledge. He goes back in time to try to understand what knowledge is and how the internet has changed those concepts of knowledge. He wants to analyze what the true definition of knowledge is and how knowledge began; which he refers to as “the infrastructure of knowledge.” Weinberger says knowledge started with the enlightenment thinkers and the divine right and those people from that era because their ideas came from there own minds and no other place. His questions are weather true knowledge is what we know from others or something only we know that’s not from the internet. He doesn’t know if the internet is making us dumber or smarter by filling us with information. He says ” there’s obviously plenty of data in the world, but not a lot of wisdom” Weinberger states that true knowledge is when someone takes information out of nothing. For example in the old times people use to collect data and from this data they got information in which they created knowledge from for others to know. That is real wisdom according to him. He says “information is to data what wine is to a vineyard; the delicious extract and distillate.” But now  with the internet there is to much knowledge and it has been reducing what we need to know. Knowledge itself changes in the age of the internet. We have the Internets information as a given and work from there and try to use it to make us smarter; that is not what knowledge is about.  Weinberger says “knowledge is so important to us for deciding matters of state that bar needs to be set high.” I think that the understanding of knowledge infrastructure can make us better researchers because we should know first of all not to believe and copy everything from the internet since its other people knowledge and second we should take one idea from the internet and expand from it using our own mind and make questions/ hypothesis out of that information.

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