Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Review

By Tom Matrullo

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.

Weinberger unfolds his theme in prose so witty and lucid that some readers might errantly think he must be talking about matters that either are patently obvious or manifestly unimportant. When he says, for example, "The way we look to marketers…is precisely how we don't look to ourselves," the felicity of the expression almost distracts us from the depth of the insight.

As Weinberger's argument comes into view through eight entertaining chapters, what seemed simple begins to reveal its complexity. Gradually we see that the clarity of the exposition should not be mistaken for ease of thought. And we gather that although the author sounds like a nice man, this is no guarantee that his small pieces, once joined, will give us any new fodder for our complacency.

Weinberger, one of the co-authors of the highly successful Cluetrain Manifesto, is trained in philosophy, and openly acknowledges his debt to continental predecessors, especially Martin Heidegger. This is worth saying early on, because 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. I do not pretend to have mastered the relevant texts, so it's likely that I am ignoring many ramifications of Weinberger's view.

The Web, Weinberger says, is like the world we inhabit, only without the opacity, the "thingliness" (a Heideggerian term that Weinberger has far too much taste to inflict on us) of nature. 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 -- like Plato's souls prior to entering their bodies and becoming creatures of earth.

The consequences are suggestive: kids are suddenly arrested for trying on roles they might have never attempted in "real life"; interests rapidly connect microgroups unobstructed by snow, traffic, or distance; employees get fired for sharing off-color jokes via email; Web sites bursting with frank, uninhibited expression offer new, if not always uplifting, insights into who we are as individuals and as a society.

But if the absence of physics gives us a facility to explore ourselves and others, it also presents a vast new theater of action for enterprising con artists and hucksters. Instead of three phony telemarketing calls, we receive 350 pieces of spam. The Web's lightness of Being works equally well for crooks - there is no inherent moral vector…or is there?

Even as the chapters on Space, Time, Perfection, Togetherness, Knowledge and Matter explore properties of the "new world" of the Web, they elaborate a theory of why we need to know this. For everyone surely will ask, why is this digital extension of ourselves more fraught with significance than other technological marvels of our day?

This is where Weinberger has a good deal to tell us - but only if we are open to hearing a sort of contrapuntal argument that develops on two planes simultaneously. One plane offers a naïve description of properties of the Web - "naïve" in the sense of "relatively free from the warping of prejudicial interest."

The other plane brings us up to speed on a rich "back story" about the attenuation of our shared human reality -- thanks to developments arising in philosophy (especially in Descartes), continuing with 19th century scientific reductions of the real to the measurable, and achieving a crescendo of diminuendo in the aspirations of computing and artificial intelligence to create new minds and relieve us of our need to invoke higher causes, such as divine beings.

The upshot of this inexorable march to modernity is that 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. We know more (we think), manage better (we "know"), and care less.

It is from this fallen, "anorexic" realm that the Web offers us a glimmer of a means of escape. But how?

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." Instead of the etcetera of faceless broadcast assemblages, the Web keeps putting forth fresh clusters of individualized peers.

These new relationships manifest themselves through what Weinberger sees as an older, more fundamental kind of knowledge, bound up with stories, jokes, voice, conversations, dreams, caring - all of which he calls "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:

We get to kick in the teeth the idealized - and constricted - set of behaviors known as professionalism.

The Web incorporates richer forms of social interaction and knowledge that seemed well on their way to oblivion -- ever since Descartes thought he would declare that he thought he *was* simply by virtue of thinking that he would be if his text said that he could not not be because he or it stipulated that he would be if he or it said that he thought he was... (Have I got that right, Rene?)

Perhaps I should let Weinberger explain:

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 not another way of communicating, or socializing, or selling. Or, it is all this, but only because on a more basic level, it's a way of returning us to our humanity. And it's only in its infancy.

This argument appeared sufficiently compelling (this summary does it little justice - read it yourself) that I felt obliged to look for its weak points. The problem is, its elements are very well thought out -- not loosely joined at all. If there are places where the analysis appears vulnerable, they appear sins of omission rather than commission. I will touch on two, to suggest where I think Small Pieces leaves some terrain unexplored.

The chapter on "Space" explores the strange confluence of placeness with writing that characterizes the structure of the Web as we know it. These places, Weinberger argues, are basically "a weird amalgam of documents and buildings." We "visit" sites, we "go" to pages - we're thinking real estate, unquestionably.

But what about peer to peer transfer? Peer to peer, as the sons and daughters of Napster suggest, is an enormously vital element of the Net. It does indeed involve groups linked by interests, but the members of these groups are essentially anonymous - what seems to matter in peer to peer are "the goods." Occasionally I get curious about some oddball who happens to have a song that I've been forever trying to get. But do I start chatting with that person? Almost never. In the future, with a different sort of interface? Maybe.

Another moment when I think the argument could bear down more occurs as several themes come together in the final sentence of the "Space" chapter:

That makes it easy to lose sight of the fact that what holds the Web together isn't a carpet of rock but the world's collective passion.

The note of consonance here seems a bit too easily won; the harmony of phrases like "collective passion" begs the question of what might be getting swept under the rhetorical carpet.

From a certain admittedly mundane perspective, the Web appears less the manifestation of some vast, overarching human passion than a baggy bundle of innumerable individual enthusiasms, admirations, hatreds, greeds, kindnesses, political posturings, egos, desires, disgusts, cruelties, venalities and stupidities, not to mention inflated notions of self importance out the wahzoo. Indeed, the inflationary component of Web writing might warrant a separate investigation. An early and very reductive review of Small Pieces by Jon Katz, for example, provoked an avalanche of comments from a chorus of Slashdotters who clearly felt that not having read a book (it was two months away from being in stores) posed no obstacle to sniggering about it. We might call this Fat/Headed.Knowledge. If a genuine harmony of collective passion is audible on the Net, it helps to possess a Wordsworthian greatness of soul to consistently hear it.

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.

Note ~ A discussion blog devoted to Small Pieces has begun here.

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