"Too Big To Know" by David Weinberger: Prologue/Chapter 1 Summary/Response

Say goodbye to the paper trail, the reign of 'experts', and possibly your sanity. According to David Weinberger, the internet has ushered in a new era of knowledge; one that shatters the traditional hierarchical pyramid of data, information, knowledge and wisdom into a vast amorphous network which is literally too big for one person to ever consume. This is the main idea Weinberger is trying to convey in his book Too Big To Know, and he wastes no time acquainting readers to it. In the Prologue, Weinberger presents the idea of a network of knowledge and introduces his infamous phrase ... He also shows his negative view of the internet with phrases like "everyone with any stupid idea" to describe internet content, while balancing it nicely with how he believes it helps improve science, business, and other things.
Weinberger spends the first chapter of Too Big To Know going into more depth about how the internet is reshaping the way knowledge and information is filtered and organized. He writes about how editorial, curatorial, and professional filters have been replace with algorithmic and social techniques only popular in the age of the internet. These new techniques only sort the knowledge and information so that it is easy to find rather than filtering the verified and expert backed to the front, radically changing our most basic strategy of knowing from knowing-by-reducing to including. Weinberger is neither endorsing our newest and messiest form of communication nor praising it for the strength which it gets from the variety of people in it, he is simply discussing the changes which are happening to our complex system of knowledge.
I really liked how Weinberger defined knowledge as "actionable information" (even though it was Russel Ackoff who said it originally). He also used an interesting quote by Milan Zeleny which described knowledge as "the recipe that turns information into bread, while data are like the atoms that make up the flour and the yeast". Because we rarely stop to think about what knowledge is, I realized that if someone had asked me to define knowledge before I read the Prologue and 1st Chapter of Weinberger's book that I likely wouldn't have been able to. Weinberger used the DIKW pyramid a lot when talking about how our filter system of the past used to function and then compared it to the web-like structure of our knowledge system today. By using these shapes to describe this fundamental change, he made the concept very easy to grasp and picture visually.