Small Pieces Loosely Joined by David Weinberger

Are you feeling burnt-out, frustrated, tired of everything having to do with the Internet? Then for you, Small Pieces Loosely Joined could be like a revival meeting, giving you a taste of the old-time religion.

If there were a church of the Internet, this would be one of its sacred books, celebrating the Web as a social place, rather than technology. As David Weinberger puts it, "The Web is a social place that we humans constructed voluntarily out of a passion to show how the world looks to us." p. 166

Weinberger emphasizes the human and paradoxical aspects of the Web -- how we behave and interact there and what that says about what it means to be human.

He ruminates about the implications of what we've been doing on the Web for the last nine years. The Web isn't just technology. It connects people to people in new ways, leads to new behavior, leads to new ways of thinking about what is possible in terms of human relationships. It opens the possibility for you to be a creative individual while at the same time being part of a mass crowd. He clearly articulates thoughts that many of us have probably glimpsed before in a fog, and then he digs a little deeper into what that means, and tickles our brains with intriguing conclusions.

He starts with the firmly held belief that the Internet changes everything; and then asks, over and over again, in what ways is that true?

He starts with the assumption that, in the long term, the dot-com boom and crash doesn't matter much. The Internet has affected us in far more profound ways than stock prices and get-rich-quick schemes that failed. As he puts it, "If the Internet sometimes feels like a Gold Rush, that's due more to the rush than to the gold." (p. 59)

Weinberger dares to wonder about matters that many of us have left unexamined since college -- the nature of knowledge, the destiny of man, the importance of passion. He creates a context in which he can actually say something so bizarre and outrageous as "... the Web's architecture itself is fundamentally moral," p. 183, and not only do you know what he means -- you believe him.

The subtitle -- "a Unified Theory of the Web" -- is totally irrelevant. There is no theory here, and certainly (thankfully) nothing is unified. Rather, this is an insightful meditation on the nature of the Internet, delivered with style and humor, together with religious awe at this phenomenon that brings out unexpected potential of mankind.

Now don't get the idea that this is a zealot's view through rose-colored glasses. Weinberger doesn't overlook the faults and problems. But rather he celebrates the very imperfection. For instance:

• "On the Web, perfection is scary." p. 72
• "... as Tim Berners-Lee, the Web's inventor is reported to have said, the 'Web will always be a little bit broken.' We are, too." p. 76
• "The imperfection of the Web isn't a temporary lapse; it's a design decision. It flows directly form the fact that the Web is unmanaged and uncontrolled so that it can grow rapidly and host innovations of every sort. The designers weighed perfection against growth and creativity, and perfection lost. The Web is broken on purpose." p. 79
• "... the design assumption of the Internet is that it's an imperfect world." p.79
• " The Web actually revels in mistakes, errors, howlers, slips, and foibles." p. 85

"The Web celebrates our imperfection, ludicrous creatures that we are. Its juice comes from being as many points of view as people and as many ways of talking as there are Web pages. The Web is where we can air our viewpoints, experiment, play, and fail, and then get right back on our feet and try again. It is not headed towards agreement. Ever. There isn't' one way of thinking or talking or behaving on the Web, and if there were, who'd want to go? The Web would be just a large 'information resource', a place where we find answers. But the Web is far more interesting. It will never be perfect -- complete, final, total, true without exception, good without hesitation. It is, therefore, a genuine reflection of our imperfect human nature, and a welcome relief from the anal-perfectionism imposed on so much of our real-world lives." p. 94

• "We are the true 'small pieces' of the Web, and we are loosely joining ourselves in ways that we're still inventing." p. x
• "It's not a container waiting to be filled; it is more like a book that is being written." p. 45
• "...what holds the Web together isn't a carpet of rock but the world's collective passion." p. 56
• "The Web reminds us that the fundamental unit of time isn't a moment, it's a story, and the string that holds time together isn't mere proximity of moments but our interest in the story." p. 59
• "... it's as if as we're trying to fill every available temporal niche on the Web with new types of talking." p. 62
• "We're more like the fish than the fisherman: we're interested in what hooks us." p. 66
• "Name a reason a person might want to communicate with another and you'll find someone using the Web that way." p. 82
• "What would it mean if we could replace the faceless masses with the face-ful masses?" p. 100
• "... on the Web, everyone will be famous to fifteen people." p. 104
• " On the Web, the community is defined by interest, not geography, and there is no natural boundary to how large the circle of fame can grow..." p. 104
• " If the real-world public reduces us to our lowest common denominator, the Web public consists of an enormous mass of people who are visible only insofar as they are individuals with something to say." p. 105
• " [The Web] ... is a complex overlapping, ever-shifting set of individuals who have organized themselves into groups of every sort, including some that are only now being invented." p. 108
• "... the Web consists of a mass that refuses to lose its individual faces." p. 115
• " On the Web, each person is present only insofar as she has presented herself in an individual expression of her interests: many small faces, each distinct within the multitude. And since being on the Web is a voluntary activity, we are forced to face the excruciating fact that we spend so much real-world energy denying: not only do we live in a shared world, but we like it that way. You could build a new destiny for your species on an idea as radical as that." p. 120
• "... irony is the Web's middle name." p. 139
• "The Web is a written world. The 300 million people on the Web are its authors." p. 145
• "... put a document on the Web and it explodes. rather than being self-contained, it becomes hyperlinked. A page without hyperlinks is literally a dead-end on the Web. But this is most remarkable, for it means that now documents get at least some of their value not from what they contain but from what they point to." p. 170
• "The message of the Web as a medium is this: Ultimately, matter doesn't matter. If we can be together so successfully in a world that has no atoms, no space, no uniform time, no management, and no control, then maybe we've been wrong about what matters in the real world in the first place." p. 174
• "Like a language, the Web enables us to meet not in distance but in meanings." p. 193
• "Unlike the real world, though, there's no nature in this new world, nothing into which we are born except what we have made for one another. Unlike the real world, we aren't thrown into it but enter voluntarily, the clicking of our mice like knocks on a door. Unlike the real world, the new world of the Web is thoroughly and inalienably ours." p. 193

Other book reviews by Richard Seltzer

Other recommended Internet-related books

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