I recently read Small Pieces Loosely Joined, by David Weinberger.
This piece is in part a review, and in part a reflection and extension of Weinberger’s themes.
“Small Pieces” is a meditation on the influence of the internet on our understanding of the world, which sounds a lot heavier than the book reads. To appreciate the tone of the book, keep Dr. Weinberger’s bio in mind; he ditched a career as a philosophy professor to write jokes for Woody Allen; and has followed the high-tech marketing route to become a sort of “maggid of new media.” (maggid = itinerant storytelling hassidic preacher), interpreting the events of the day to convey an important message in an entertaining way. The message is an irreverent yet faithful humanism: “this is the web’s nature; for everything on it was put there by a human being for a reason.”
Summary
The book is organized by theme, contrasting our experience of the internet with the assumptions of the “default philosophy” we hold in our heads.
- Space. We understand the web using a spatial metaphor; websites feel like places. Yet the space of the web is measured by emotions and interests, rather than rather the impersonal lines of surveyor’s grid
- Time. On the internet, time isn’t measured in industrial clock-time; it is experienced as parallel, overlapping threads, and comprehended through stories that make sense of time.
- Knowledge. The internet isn’t a dry library of objective facts, instead, knowledge is fleshed out with passions and opinions; and
readers use their judgement to filter the relevant from the wacky. - Perfection. Instead of the phony perfection of glossy marketing materials; the web celebrates real human imperfection.
- Togetherness. In contrast to the myth of individual identity; the web is a thoroughly social place where our identities are built in relation to others. In contrast to physical space, where we lose our individuality when we’re a face in the crowd; the internet lets us retain our individuality in the group.
- Matter. In contrast to our conventional realist, materialist assumption that things you can drop on your toe are realer than thoughts, feelings and meanings, the web is a world that consists of stories and interpretations of stories.
- Hope. In contrast to modern solipsism and alienation; the web is based on the social bonds that are the foundations of morality.
Commentary
David Weinberger has the insight that the web is about conversation and stories. It seems to me that this brings to common humanity a set of genres and insights that were pioneered by the rabbis of the talmud.
Weinberger argues against the cold, empirical, rationalist tradition that has come down to us from the Greeks through western philosophy. Yet the structure of the book is in the tradition of the Greeks. The chapter titles are big, abstract philosophical concepts; space, time, matter, knowledge, hope.
In classical Rabbinic writing, the abstract is reached by way of the concrete. Instead of abstract discussion of “justice” and “beauty”, the talmud containes two main genre categories.
* Aggada: stories, legends, commentary
* Halacha: ritual and ethical practice, expressed as arguments about law
I’d like to propose an alternative reading, using the categories of talmudic writing, to agree with Weinberger’s main points, and to take them a few steps further in a couple of directions.
Aggada/Culture
Weinberger is thoroughly right that the web is a place where people gather to create shared meaning. There are sites celebrating the
Metropolitan Opera and Melanie Griffith; and weblogs where people create meaning from personal stories about cats, life, and loss. There is nothing more human than people creating culture; using drums in the African forests, pianos in 19th century parlors, Passion plays and Passover seders, playing and retelling the culture’s myths to the group.
The Talmud’s form reminds us that philosophy and meaning is conveyed by means of stories and interpretations, rather than through logical, linear arguments.
We’ve been living with a wierd anomaly for the last century or so in which culture has been mass-produced and distributed via mass media. We expect our culture to come from a corporate studio, rather than collective storytelling. The internet brings back ancient traditions of humans working and playing together tell stories and make our culture.
Halacha
A large part of the Talmud’s content consists of discussions of halacha, Jewish law. The scope of halacha is different from western law; it includes rituals (holidays, life cycle rituals, prayers); ethics (business practices, interpersonal relationships); as well as categories that are familiar in western law: civil law, criminal law, family law.
The translatable aspect of halacha for our purposes is the emphasis on action rather than abstraction, and its categories of ritual and ethical actions.
Halacha/ritual
Weinberger talks about how the web enables the exchange of holiday letters, stories of birth and death, sharing congratulations and
condolences. These are online expressions of the seasonal and lifecycle rituals that humans observe; except connected across distance, and recorded in a persistent medium.
It will be interesting to see how people will make use of the web’s persistence: when will we build persistent shrines, continually refreshing the old; when will we use forms, like weblogs,
that celebrate the new; when will we apply search and editing to discover wisdom in the voices of the past, and and when will we simply walk away from last year’s conversations, leaving a clutter of jumbled archives and old sites with rotted links.
Halacha/ethical action
In Weinberger’s argument, the web is a moral place. It expresses peoples desires to associate in groups, and to care about our fellows. (This is true for better and worse; al Qaeda and the KKK have mutual bonds and care about their fellows, as well). If the web’s social nature has moral consequences, then we’ve got the “aggada” — group story-telling, to learn from each others’ experiece. But we but we have not yet fully developed the halacha; we are missing some of the needed mechanisms to turn our online caring into action.
The internet gives us some hyper-efficient ways to automate errands and business tasks, such as ordering books and renewing drivers’
licenses online. But we need to develop more effective ways to link online storytelling and conversation with real-world action action.
Early examples of this are MoveOn, a site that makes it easy for people to make political donations and sign advocacy petitions, and MeetUp, which makes it easy for online interest groups (whose interests might be social, or cultural, or political), to arrange local meetings.
The limits of the metaphor
A big difference between the Talmud’s genres and Weinberger’s world is the role of individuality. The Rabbis did not have a well-developed sense of individual identity. Individual characters had personalities, to be sure, but character is seen primarily as a set of moral attributes, rather than an expression of an inner world. Weinberger’s focus on the expression of our individuality in the context of our communities is more modern, and appealing in its modernity.
Also, halacha is normative. The rabbis debated ritual and ethical actions to determine which actions were required, which were permitted, and which were forbidden. Of course, all human subcultures have community norms and rules, but many cultures are not as interested in this sort of imperative structure.
These interpretations — aggada as culture and halacha as action — are secularized and universalized versions of the Talmudic concepts. On some level I think that is what the internet is doing — it is taking a set of hypertext-based cultural forms that pioneered by the Rabbis of the talmud, and bringing them to society at large.
Authenticity and Romanticism
Small Pieces makes the case that the web is a place; with its territory marked out by our interests and passions. In a heartwarming and very American fashion, Weinberger assumes and takes for granted that our interests are democratic and plural. It is worth pausing, noticing and appreciating the fact that our “interests” aren’t just identified with geography, ethnicity; political affiliation; gender; or work, but are a mixtures of bits and pieces.
As in the Cluetrain Manifesto, Weinberger is a big fan of the internet as the home of our true, passionate, authentic voices. But when one’s identity is plural, what does “authentic” mean? Second-generation hyphenated Americans, like me or, say, Miko, are acutely conscious of the problem involved in the term “authenticity,” which is
often used as a bludgeon by people with a parochial interest in arguing that you are not American enough or Jewish enough or Japanese enough or whatever. The same goes for any non-binary component of identity.
The focus on “authenticity” is a symptom of the book’s underlying romanticism, which is a pretty big flaw in the argument. Weinberger
argues with 18th century enlightenment rationalism and 20th century managerial scientism; using some traditional arguments out of Romantic philosophy and esthetics; the glorification of passion, individual voice, and communal ethic. The book raises these romantic contradictions to enlightenment convention as though they were brand new insights; whereas romanticism is just as much a part of our default philosophy as realism is. Furthermore, romanticism, in its 19th century nationalist guise and its 60s individualist guise has already showed its limitations in its tendencies toward lethal idealism and countercultural hedonism.
In citing the multi-threaded nature of time on the internet, Weinberger pays no attention to the contributions of post-modernist thinkers. To be fair, Weinberger is attacking our “default philosophy”, and pomo arguably hasn’t reached that broadly and deeply into conventional wisdom. Nevertheless, the playful ironies and sampled mixes of postmodernism are a significant influence in the playful, self-mocking style of .Zannah; the writer of the prototypical weblog, #!/usr/bin/girl, that Weinberger cites, as well as the the tasty stew of popular and intellectual culture found in weblogs by folks like Peter Merholz and David Weinberger himself.
Conclusion
The book achieves an entertaining balance of philosophy and wit, sometimes at the expense of fleshing out its ideas. I wish some of the ideas were developed more fully, but then it would have been a different book, and who am I to argue with the populist instincts of a writer who’s achieved #6 on the Business Week best-seller list.
Also (as others have noted) the book’s audience focus is uneven; Weinberger takes pages to explain the basics of internet technology; as if the audience consisted of “the in-laws”; ordinary, intelligent people who use the internet but don’t know how it works. Yet the book also assumes familiarity and interest in the tactics and culture of high-tech marketing; as if the audience consisted of fellow e-business mavens.
These quibbles are mostly beside the point, since I think the book largely achieves its own objectives. Like Weinberger’s best writing and public speaking, it made me think and it made me laugh.