Knowledge in the Internet Age - networked knowledge - is becoming more like what knowledge has been in the past few hundreds years for scientists: it's provisional; it's a hypothesis that is waiting to be disproved.
From David Weinberger
Knowledge is now accepted as the best we humans can do at the moment, but with the hope that we will turn out to be wrong - and thus to advance our knowledge. What's happening to networked knowledge seems to make it much closer to the scientific idea of what knowledge is.
In the university library, we know when a book has been used in a class or put on reserve... or while it was out, did somebody call it back in. It turns out to be a pretty good indicator of how relevant the work is at that time.
How your social network - the people that you know, or in your community - understand or value a work can be... a tremendously relevant indicator of how important or meaningful it's going to be to you.
We've organized ourselves as cultures, to a large degree, around what we agree we know. And when you have multiple ways of knowing, multiple ways of organizing, the society loses one of its deepest organizational principles.
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