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"David Weinberger's new book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined {A Unified Theory of the Web} (Perseus Books, 2002) takes an impossible subject - the whatness of the Web - and gives us several well landscaped avenues tending toward a central insight of great value."
" . . . 'The way we look to marketers…is precisely how we don't look to ourselves'"
" . . . Small Pieces is very much an effort to look at the Web in the light of an understanding of human nature that resonates with Heidegger's thinking about the human, about tools, and about time. . . . It's as if our bodies and their nuisance appurtenances of time, space and matter were to be drained off, leaving a sort of puree of human intentionality. In a way, our Web selves are newly naked . . . "
" . . . interests rapidly connect microgroups unobstructed by snow, traffic, or distance . . . "
" . . . the human condition is in a rather sorry state: we are profoundly alienated from nature, from the divine, from our origins, our ends, our neighbors, our hearts and ourselves. . . . It is from this . . . 'anorexic' realm that the Web offers us a glimmer of a means of escape."
"A key paradox for Weinberger, is that the Web's apparent incorporeality enables us to recover a rich mode of long-untapped relationships with one another - and with the world - that reflect the full-bodied experience of life as it is when it is fully 'lived.' . . . the Web keeps putting forth fresh clusters of individualized peers."
"These new relationships manifest themselves through . . . 'fat' knowing as opposed to the spectral utilitarian marshalling of facts that passes for 'formal' knowledge in the traditional temples of establishment intelligence: universities, news organizations, think tanks, databases, research labs, and the like . . . The Web incorporates richer forms of social interaction and knowledge that seemed well on their way to oblivion . . . "
"'Our experience of the Web is closer to the truth of our lived experience than are our ideas about our lived experience.' . . . This is a cumulative insight of grace, elegance and profundity, and it pulls together many of the book's threads in a final chapter entitled "Hope" that soars. For Weinberger, the Web is . . . a way of returning us to our humanity. And it's only in its infancy."
"He's on to a major story: this Internet thing is big . . . In weaving a new world within the void of our historical moment, the Web is less a tool than a response, in small pieces, to a wish we'd nearly forgotten we had. For too long, we've been dining on beastly thin cognitive gruel. The Net's unbelievable size, irreducible weirdness and uncontrollable energy reflects how starved we are for the smallest bits of madly inspired life."
... [more]
1:56:57 PM Google It! 
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