David Weinberger discusses in his work “Too Big to Know”, how knowledge has changed over the course of time due to the development of the Internet. He speaks about how people use to have to go to school for long periods of time to achieve their degree and become actual experts in a subject. However, now in this day in age, people are considered experts just by their efforts of blogging and writing a post on social media about a particular matter. When Weinberger speaks about the infrastructure of knowledge, he is referring to the variety of ways knowledge can be achieved or portrayed. By knowledge infrastructure, Weinberger means the organization and structure of knowledge. He believes that knowledge is based on “credentials” such as degrees and publications and not simple opinions.
According to Weinberger the infrastructure of knowledge is the multiple ways people can achieve knowledge and currently the way people achieve it is not really successful. The way we grab knowledge has also changed because of the internet. The way we receive knowledge has also changed by the information given over the internet. Weinberger states that “knowledge is constantly questioned, challenged, rethought, and rewritten.” The infrastructure of knowledge Weinberger is referring to is the way we look for and receive knowledge, because of so many new networks becoming available. We can not rely on the internet too much. We have to research more in order to know if the information is accurate.He further discusses the topic of networking knowledge in his book. “Knowledge now lives not just in libraries and museums and academic journals. It lives not just in the skulls of individuals. Knowledge is now a property of the network, and the network embraces businesses, governments, media, museums, curated collections, and minds in communication.” There is so many different ways of receiving knowledge that it can be a bit overwhelming. Some resources seem more knowledgeable than others and it is up to us to decide which we believe is more accurate and well- informed.
Weinberger does reinforce that knowledge makes us better researchers in a way that we should be aware of credible and reliable information. When we have credible information and we know it is credible, the researching process becomes much easier. Yes, there is an information “overload” as Weinberger puts it, but we have filters. These filters ” increase information and reveal the whole deep sea” ( 13). There is so much information out there and there is no “running away from knowledge” we just need to know how to require information without overloading our brains. It makes the researcher find information faster by being able to find whatever they are looking for and by using certain keywords. The infrastructure (to knowledge) can be viewed as a better viewing for internet researchers. The reason to that is because there is more access to knowledge on different topics, but the only thing with that is that you would have to research more, in order to make sure that the information is accurate and not just some unreliable information.
