There is a telling moment in the film the History Boys where a teacher tells a student of the feeling that you get when you think that you are the only person in the world to have a special insight about something and then you read a book and find your thoughts articulated by another so much better. You are not alone in your thinking and someone has the skill to take your rambling thoughts and to define with with great cogency.
This is how I feel this morning. I went to bed early last night with David Weinberger's new book, Everything is Miscellaneous - The Power of the New Digital Disorder. I tried to put it down but had to get up and read it until I had finished. I had a very restless night when I had - my poor old brain has been processing in background all night.
One of the thoughts that springs to my fore-brain today is the descriptor part of the title that tells us that the book is about "Power".
The challenge that David presents the reader is that there is a true revolution that has been set in motion like a brush fire that will become a wildfire that will take all before it.
5,000 years of literacy has made information increasingly into a thing. It has become increasingly explicit. The confines of paper and the physical world have defined how information is stored, controlled and owned. Today a student puts a dot in a circle for a right or a wrong answer in an exam. Higher education has been captured by the idea that knowledge is a thing. Businesses are built on owning explicit information - hence Microsoft state that they intend to sue on more than 100 patents. Information was organized by how convenient it was to ship a thing - hence the record album versus the song. Information was good or bad by right of who controlled it - hence Britannica.
David calls this 2nd order information. It is the foundation of power in every field today.
"We have entire industries and institutions built upon the fact that paper order severely limits how things can be organized. Museums, educational curricula, newspapers, the travel industry and TV schedules are all based on the assumption that in the second order world, we need experts to go through information, ideas and knowledge and put them neatly away.
But now we - the customers, the employees, anyone - can route around the second order. We can confront the miscellaneous directly in all its unfulfilled glory. We can do it ourselves and , more significantly, we can do it together, figuring out the arrangements that make sense for us now and the new arrangements that make sense a minute later. Not only can we find what we need faster, but traditional authorities cannot maintain themselves by insisting that we go to them.
The miscellaneous order is not transforming only business. It is changing how we think about the world itself is organized - perhaps more important - who we think has the authority to tell us so."
This is the challenge that David sets himself at the beginning of the book - to make the case for a revolution of power driven by the difference in how information is regarded, stored, accessed and used.
The triumph of the book is that he meets this challenge. He build layer and layer of example to meet the demands of his challenge.
The existing power owners face a terrible paradox.
"This creates a conundrum for businesses as they enter the digital age. If they don't allow their users to structure information for themselves, they will lose their patrons. If they do allow patrons to structure information for themselves, the organization will lose much of their power and control.
The paradox is already resolving itself. Customers, patrons, users and citizens are not waiting for permission to take control of finding and organizing information. And we're doing it not just as individuals. Knowledge - its content and its organization - is becoming a social act."
David spends a large part of the book explaining this process. Here is my own synthesis.
Explicit knowledge can never help a person as well as tacit knowledge. Example - you have just bought a barbecue. You could spend all of Saturday with the instructions or you could ask your handy neighbor over. What is the better process? We all know the answer. Well that is the difference. David's point is that real information that is really useful is best found below the surface and is teased out by conversation.
When paper became the only storage medium, explicit knowledge and all its official filters and gatekeepers got the power. Now, using bits information can be stored at no cost all over the place and linked to everything. There is NO ONE RIGHT ANSWER. The ONE RIGHT ANSWER is a product of the limits of a physical, paper, storage system. There are 60 million blogs now. Follow a tag on a topic, you will find maybe millions of entries - some great some poor - but in aggregate a truth emerges that can never happen if you had to write the definitive piece on the topic. Except maybe over time. Imagine Wikipedia in 20 years time. Some key articles will have been polished so well by so many people over such a period of time that maybe the implicit will have been captured. This process cannot be replicated by Britannica.
"One of the lessons of Wikipedia is that conversation improves expertise by exposing weaknesses, introducing new viewpoints and pushing ideas into accessible form."
David asks, will our kids today - who share every element of their lives in public - be able to go back to the cave and insist that knowledge is a solitary act where their is only one way?
"Now we cans see that knowledge isn't in our heads. It is between us. It emerges from public and social thought and it stays there, because social knowing, like the global conversations that give rise to it, is never finished."
What is also happening, other than a shift of power, is that something that has been lost will return.
What has been lost in a world that focuses only on the surface - is meaning.
Today complex problems confront us. Finding meaning in them will be the difference between our survival or not. Looking only at complex problems such as the economy and the planet or what is health or what is education or what is peace though the lens of the explicit leads only to lists and to barriers of beliefs that cannot be crossed.
Meaning arises from conversation. A marriage becomes a marriage that might survive when a couple continue to share their feelings. Children are set on a trajectory for health and energy when they have the right to participate in the conversation that is a healthy family. People who work together can do great things when they know and trust each other deeply - this can only happen when they know each other deeply and this can only happen when real conversation over many years has been part of the process.
The traditional power brokers hold their power though shutting down conversation. It is no surprise to me that Facebook and MY Space are getting banned by institutions such as governments and schools. This is a life and death struggle for power.
But those that allow the meaning will triumph.
"The infrastructure of meaning is always present and available, so that we can contextualize the information that we find and the ideas that we encounter. It's business's new greatest resource. Because it is shared by all - customers, partners and competitors - the businesses that succeed will be the ones that embrace it most thoroughly and most intelligently."
Power for individuals changes as well:
"The result is a startling change in our culture's belief that truth means accuracy, effectiveness requires clear lines of command and control and knowledge is power.
It is not who is right and who is wrong. It's how different points of view are negotiated, given context and are embodied with passion and interest. Individuals thinking out loud now have weight. Authority and expertise are losing some of their gravity.
It is not whom you report to and who reports to you or how you filter someone else's experience. It is how messily you are connected and how thick are the links.
It's not what you know, and its not even who you know. It's how much knowledge that you give away. Hoarding knowledge diminishes your power because it diminishes your presence.
A topic is not a domain with edges. It is how passion focuses itself."
So David presents us all with a choice. Hang on and die or move and have a chance of a great life.
So to my friends in public radio - it is not about the news. It is not about the music. It is about the meaning of the news and the meaning of music. It is all about story. It is all about giving up your fixation on control. It is all about helping your listener find more meaning.
So to my friends in education - the university that returns to Plato's academy will rock the world.
So to my friends in business - the organization that exists to create meaning for its employees and for its customers will roll over those that merely try and make money for a few king pins.