We’ve had the end of many things lately . .  it started with the end of modernism. The postmodernists declared that everything was an interpretation that occurs within a particular context and both the interpretation and the context are products of a particular culture and historical point in time. Hogwash, detractors have argued for years. But now along comes David Weinberger, who seems to have counted himself among the detractors for some years. In his latest book, Too Big to Know, Weinberger proclaims that the Internet has vindicated those crazy postmodernists after all. Derrida and his gang were right all along. And knowledge as we are used to thinking about it is dead, a passé concept from a bygone era.

According to Weinberger, things have changed because knowledge is no longer found just in books but also on the Net, where it is linked into complex configurations that defy the weight of authority. Apparently anything goes on the Internet and Weinberger seem to revel in it as he celebrates our new age without traditional knowledge: “Welcome to the life of knowledge once it has been taken down from its shelf. It is misquoted, degraded, enhanced, incorporated, passed around through a thousand degrees of misunderstanding, and assimilated to the point of invisibility.” Knowledge, which used to be part of a pyramid that included data, information, knowledge, and wisdom, has become unknowable and impossible to master,  Weinberger argues. He finds the shapelessness of knowledge reinvigorating, although he notes that this has unfortunately deprived knowledge of its foundations.

Weinberger’s argument is far-reaching: He claims that the very nature of knowledge is different because of the Internet. His rather jazzy subtitle draws the outline of the argument: “Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room.” Today, knowledge is messy. And it’s so complexly linked that the human brain can no longer fully comprehend it. “Knowledge now is the unshaped web of connections within which expressions of ideas live.” And it’s constantly being revised and debated so that knowledge has become a never-ending process.

I have to object to such a view. Just because any cracked pot (including I suppose possibly me) can post an idiotic opinion or false facts or illogical arguments or bad poetry on the Internet doesn’t mean that knowledge is devoid of truth. If we say that the shape and content of the Internet determines what knowledge is, then we and our core humanity are truly lost. We are doomed to the wise crowd of the lowest common denominator and the smart mob in any random street.

Yes, we live in an age of “Big Data,” where sensors and tracking software record an enormous amount of data points, and yes such vast amounts of data make it easier to go wrong, but that still doesn’t mean there might not be a pattern in the data that could divulge some information. It’s still possible that collecting and analyzing enough information might lead to new insights and real knowledge.  And yes, the Internet seems to be capable of holding infinite amounts of data and information. But hasn't knowledge always been an open-ended affair? That’s what Hamlet was trying to tell Horatio when he told him there were “more things in Heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” And as for the fact that all this information seems hopelessly fragmentary,  ninety years ago T.S. Eliot was complaining about the same thing as he wrote in The Waste Land about the mere “fragments I have shored against my ruins.” Sure, the Internet may be unfathomable. But so too are the human heart and the human brain.

I find it heartening and enlightening to listen to scientists and artists who grapple with the mysteries of life at the edge of knowledge. The neuroscientist and researcher David Eagleman explained it well in a recent  interview on NPR: “We’re always looking for patterns. . . .  I’ve spent my life in science. .  .  .  It is the single most useful pursuit that we have in terms of trying to figuring out what is going on in the world. .  .  . But at some point the pier of science comes to an end and we’re standing at the end of the pier and looking at uncharted waters that go for as far as the eye can see. Most of what we’re surrounded with is mystery and what one comes to understand in a life of science is the vastness of our ignorance.”

But that doesn’t mean he didn’t go back to his lab in the morning.

I recently bought a promising book called The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in the Digital Age at the MIT Press Bookstore. Great title, I thought, and it looks like it's written by two smart people, Cathy Davidson from Duke, and David Theo Goldberg from the University of California system. Plus the project was underwritten by the MacArthur Foundation as part of a series for the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning. I enthusiastically plopped a copy into my basket and went on browsing. This’ll be good, I thought.  

The book itself, however, disappointed, and it’s been a little hard to figure out why. The actual book is less about thinking than it is about the learning environment the authors envision for the future.  But that’s OK.  I understand that the structures of our existing siloed educational institutions were conceived of centuries ago. They certainly don’t reflect the way people are learning informally outside of those institutions today. But wait. Do they have to, I asked myself? The authors seem to say yes. Is this the new reality?

Although from time to time the authors claim that they do not advocate using digital tools and technologies just because they are there, they do in fact believe that learning within institutions should better  reflect how people interact outside of formal learning environments today, including social networking tools, massively multiplayer online video gaming, virtual learning institutions, interactive collaborations, and open-access public forums. So let’s see where that takes us.

Existing traditional educational institutions are failing us, the authors argue. They envision future institutions as  "mobilizing networks." This is all very up-to-date indeed, I thought. Instead of top-down authoritative teaching and learning, the mobilizing network would support peer-to-peer learning and collaborative knowledge production. Digital learning, they emphasize, is participatory learning— which is in part code for not "teaching to the test." That’s fine. Teaching to the test has never worked very well anyway.

But there was still another problem with this book about the future of thinking.  There's a way of arguing in this book that says: “Here we are. Here are roughly the outlines of the arguments. Here are some drawbacks. But still we must go on with our vision, mustn’t we?” And they assume an audience that is fully onboard with their collaborative thinking: For example, the authors are concerned about how Web 2.0 as a network of "many-to-many collaborating and customizing together" may evolve in the wrong way as corporations such as Google gain control over more and more personal and institutional, and national information. But never mind: "Yet even though the concept is vague or open to exploitative, monopolistic, or oligopolistic (wow!) practices, Web 2.0 is a convenient way of signaling a new type of institution. It is one where contributions are distributed rather than coming from a single physical location and where ideas are shared outside the normal rules of tenure, credentialing, and professional peer review." Is there any room in their collaborative world for skepticism? For questioning whether loose collaboration-for-all is right for every age group and every discipline at all times?

There's also often a troubling lack of in-depth reasoning behind their advocacy of certain processes in the new forms of learning. Many people read differently these days, the authors argue. By implication our institutions should reflect these new processes, apparently with no analysis of their inherent value. Here's how the authors redefine reading for the digital age: "Even online reading . . . has become collaborative, interactive, nonlinear, and relational, engaging multiple voices. We browse, scan, connect in mid-paragraph if not mid-sentence to related material, look up information relevant or related to what we are reading. Sometimes this mode of relational reading might draw us completely away from the original text, hypertextually streaming us into completely new threads and pathways." It's an interesting description of what often happens online, but does it have anything to do with learning? Is it supposed to in the future?

Collaborative, many-to-multitudes, virtual, peer-to-peer—the authors  present a remix if you will of some au courante concepts. From Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, they project from economic and business theory onto the role of the university:  "If we do indeed live on the long tail,  . . . then  virtual institutions may be the long virtual tail that wags the dog of traditional institutions without which it could not exist." Huh? Other popular ideas, such as those from Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations and Yoklai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks are added into the mix, all seemingly part of the ideal audience for this book.

I suspect part of the repetitive, jingoistic, and sometime contradictory statements that emerge from the text reflect on how the text was generated. You got it:  very collaboratively. Not only did the two authors collaborate but they then posted the draft online and invited comments—for a year. The draft was also presented in three additional public forums. Lastly, the authors worked to incorporate many of the comments and concerns voiced by others. It is a form of writing by committee that can wobble under the weight of the various points of view if not carefully shepherded by one (or even two) good writers with a single strong vision.

It isn’t that the book doesn’t offer some food for thought on many issues. It does. How do we create multidisciplinary forums and projects within the currently rigid institutions? Is learning more a process of learning how to learn, than learning what,  these days? Is it less about actually acquiring the information, since the information will always be there to be acquired when needed? And what about credibility on the Internet? How prominent an emphasis do we need to give to teaching students how to discern credible sources of information as a new part of that learning "how" process?

But as for the future of thinking . . . well, it seems there still needs to be more thought put into that. I just don’t know how collaborative it has to be.