Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web

Rating:
Summary: Small Pieces, Big Story
Review: I hope David Weinberger's book reaches a broad audience, not just because I consider him a great guy and a friend. He's on to a major story: this Internet thing is big, not because it puts shopping malls on our desktops, or because we can chatter till we drop, or trade quail egg futures in markets around the world. 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. The above is taken from a review posted here: http://tom.weblogs.com/stories/storyReader$891

Rating:
Summary: The Web's first Cosmologist
Review: If John Perry Barlow is the Internet's prophet and Sherry Turkle is its anthropologist, by writing "Small Pieces, Loosely Joined," David Weinberger has become its first cosmologist, its Stephen Hawking.

In this slender, very readable and sometimes laugh-out-loud book, Weinberger examines the meaning, impact and use of the Internet with great insight and wisdom. He left me understanding how profoundly important the Internet is and how deeply it is affecting our society. It's not just another technological advance...it changes everything.

I realize that some people just don't get it, won't get it and can't get it, despite the crystal clarity of Weinberger's prose. But some people never get it.

Even Alexander Graham Bell was initially convinced the phone would be best used for transmitting music over long distances and I believe there was a fellow by the name of Watson who predicted the US would never need more than five computers. If Weinberger had been around then and writing books about telephoine and computers, they might have better understood the potential of their creations.

If you want to understand what the Internet means for us today and what it might mean tomorrow, I can think of no better basis than "Small Pieces Loosely Joined." His ideas will resonate in your mind long after you've finished the book.

Rating:
Summary: If ya gotta ask, you'll never know...
Review: In reading David Weinberger's "Small Pieces Loosely Joined", his thesis of how the Web works and impacts our lives, I couldn't help but recall Louis Armstrong's legendary response to the question "What is jazz". "Man, if ya gotta ask," he supposedly replied, "you'll never know."

"Small Pieces" tries to ask just that question: What is the Web? Not to say that Weinberger doesn't know (he does), but in trying to formulate an answer with "Small Pieces", he offers few new insights. There's nothing in this book that will hit the reader like a ton of bricks, especially if he or she has any degree of Web experience.

Indeed, while well-written and informative, the bulk of the content is a rehash of earlier Internet thinkers like Clifford Stoll, Nicholas Negroponte, Eric Raymond, Howard Rhiengold and even Jeremy Rifkin. Old-school netizens will be particularly disappointed, especially since the tone of the book comes disturbingly close to the technlogy-will-change-everything breathelessness of the dotcom days.

"Small Pieces", however, has its merits -- particularly in Weinberger's writing style. In that vein, "Small Pieces" makes a good beach book... and it's also good for those new to the Web (or at least those who are critically thinking about it for the first time). But if you really want to learn what the Web's all about, get surfing and build your own website. Like learning how to ride a bike, the only way to learn the Web is by hopping on the seat and risking a few skinned knees.

Rating:
Summary: If ya gotta ask, you'll never know...
Review: In reading David Weinberger's "Small Pieces Loosely Joined", his thesis of how the Web works and impacts our lives, I couldn't help but recall Louis Armstrong's legendary response to the question "What is jazz". "Man, if ya gotta ask," he supposedly replied, "you'll never know."

"Small Pieces" tries to ask just that question: What is the Web? Not to say that Weinberger doesn't know (he does), but in trying to formulate an answer with "Small Pieces", he offers few new insights. There's nothing in this book that will hit the reader like a ton of bricks, especially if he or she has any degree of Web experience.

Indeed, while well-written and informative, the bulk of the content is a rehash of earlier Internet thinkers like Clifford Stoll, Nicholas Negroponte, Eric Raymond, Howard Rhiengold and even Jeremy Rifkin. Old-school netizens will be particularly disappointed, especially since the tone of the book comes disturbingly close to the technlogy-will-change-everything breathelessness of the dotcom days.

"Small Pieces", however, has its merits -- particularly in Weinberger's writing style. In that vein, "Small Pieces" makes a good beach book... and it's also good for those new to the Web (or at least those who are critically thinking about it for the first time). But if you really want to learn what the Web's all about, get surfing and build your own website. Like learning how to ride a bike, the only way to learn the Web is by hopping on the seat and risking a few skinned knees.

Rating:
Summary: Philosophy of the 'Net
Review: More a look at society as bounded by the Web than a look at the Web itself, as someone described this book. That's true, for it seems to offer more insights about modern humanity and the weird situation we've created for ourselves than about the Internet itself. Topics include knowledge, time, matter - the stuff of philosophy, and not of a book about the Net.

Everyone who uses the internet should read this book. Anyone interested in modernity should read it as well, even if she doesn't have a computer.

Rating:
Summary: Significant Thoughts Loosely Joined
Review: Significant technologies affect the environments within which they operate. Environments shape, warp & re-define the technologies that operate within them. But until "Small Pieces Loosely Joined", there hasn't been a single worthwhile analysis of what these effects are and what they mean.
This *may* be the first significant book written about the major changes the Internet is (and will be) causing among the important minority of people who constitute The Wired World. It's not a business book (though aspiring entrepreneurs would learn some valuable lessons from it), nor is it a "how to" guide. The work is philosophical, sociological, but fun accessible to any reader that has interacted with other people or companies on the web or in a newsgroup. Weinberger's language tends to be simple, and sometimes colorful (e.g., "Knowledge started out fat and chewy", before launching into descriptions of opinions on knowledge from the Bible and Heraclitus).
I don't agree with the author on all his conclusions. And I'm not sure that readers who are widely-read on the social effects of computer networking will not know already many of his explanations.
But there's more valuable, insightful thinking in the first chapter of this book than in any other half-dozen Internet books you could name. If you're interested in how the Internet is changing our institutions and our way of relating to each other, and in what directions this might lead in the future should consider this lively and fun book.

Rating:
Summary: As the NYTimes says, this is a "smart new book."
Review: Small Pieces Loosely Joined by David Weinberger and Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte are the only two books worth reading on the subject of the Web. Both are spot on.

Rating:
Summary: A survey of Internet language & experience
Review: Small Pieces Loosely Joined is a survey of Internet language, experience, and relationships between reality and Web sites makes for intriguing discussions of media and it's influence on human achievement. Weinberger argues the web is more than a worldwide link: it is also a public forum with world contributors and offers the potential for lives to be lived in another realm.

Rating:
Summary: Only connect
Review: Sometimes the web seems like Calibans's mirror, where those who look for the dark parts of mens souls will find ample confirmation.

David Weinberger looks into this mirror and finds connections between people. Messy, uncontrolled, unauthorised, unplanned but full of authentic voices. As he says "Yelling, joking, teasing, provoking, criticizing, grieving, and flirting are all forms of connecting. "

The recent technological and financial hype of the Web have clouded the deeper changes that are happening to our world view because of it. David examines the detailed impact of the Web on Space, Time, Perfection, Togetherness, Knowledge, Matter and finally, like Pandora, offers Hope.

Throughout it all he explains deep ideas through clear writing and precise examples with enough epigrams to fill a .sig file.

Read this book. Think about it. Join the conversation.

Rating:
Summary: Small Pieces, Big Ideas
Review: Thanks to The Newspaper of Record, we now know that Web is boring; the Web has gotten old, and the frontier thrills of exploration and discovery have evaporated. Fortunately, no one told David Weinberger.

Weinberger's book Small Pieces, Loosely Joined proposes not only that the Web isn't boring, but that the excitement is only just beginning. We haven't missed the main event, only the previews of coming attractions.

He sees the promise of greater things yet to come in the ways that culture's engagement with the Web has already begun to influence the English language. He adopts seven key terms ("space," "time," "perfection," togetherness," "knowledge," "matter," and "hope") and illustrates the ways that their conventional usage might be seen to apply simply and directly to the Web. Then he goes further to show how these terms warp and crack with the torsion engendered by their roles in articulating Web experiences. After they have circulated online, these terms return to colloquial use with changed textures--space, perfection, hope, all signify very differently after their circulation on the Web.

Weinberger gracefully invites technological newcomers into the party. He has a gift for epigrammatic phrases, and regularly summarizes his exposition in memorable sound bites. He cites both familiar and less well-known examples of ways the Web has changed over its brief history, and of ways the Web has changed us. The heart of the book, however, lies in Weinberger's ardent affirmation of the positive possibilities that the Web opens for humanity. Without concealing the seamier dimensions of the Web, he urges readers to take up the opportunity to be better people in new ways, online.

Thus far one might construe the book--at the prompting of its title--as a new, improved theory of the Web. That would miss the point: Weinberger really hits his stride not as a pitchman for e-commerce or a disneyfied futurama, but as a reflective advocate for humanity. The subtitle might more appropriately suggest that Weinberger here offers a theory of how human beings may live more richly human lives in conjunction with the Web.

This mixed thematic impetus provides a great strength to the book. Weinberger writes with passion addressed to his readers' passions, in a way that distinguishes his work from "For Dummies" introductions or technological snake-oil pitches. Weinberger sings the opportunities that reside in the Web not with a self-interested voice, but as one who earnestly wants others to share the excitement he feels.

The mixed thematics also set Weinberger up to frustrate some readers. A book as ambitious as this one will evoke the hopes and passions of its readers, and will inevitably disappoint some. More technically-inclined readers, for instance, may wish for more detail in the discussions of the Web itself. Some readers interested in media theory may wish for fewer anecdotes and more analysis.

But this is not a book that should satisfy readers; on its own terms, the book ought to push its readers to think beyond what Weinberger himself suggests (the book, like the Web, is far from being "perfect," and is paradoxically stronger for that imperfection). This is part of Weinberger's subtle exposition of his theme. In composing a meditation on unfamiliar modes of human self-expression, Weinberger appeals to--and stimulates--our inclination to reach further than the limits of what we presently imagine. Small Pieces, Loosely Joined is not only an extraordinarily apt, lapidary description of the Web--it's the right book at the right time. We should read it appreciatively, in the hope that once we've caught up to where Weinberger leads us, he will again point out to us ways that these practices with which we've grown familiar begin to have decidedly unfamiliar effects on our lives and imaginations.