“To think that knowledge itself is shaped like books is to marvel that a rock fits so well in its hole in the ground”
My mother grew up in a small village in Friesland, a northern province of the Netherlands. Her family farm was near a canal, where she skated with friends. These days, it’s rare to get the freezing temperatures needed for hard ice. My mother often says life was simpler back then. When I asked her if it felt that way at the time, she looked me sharply in the eye and said, “No, no it didn’t.” She lived through the Great Depression and the Nazi occupation during World War II. It’s an illusion to think life is more complex today than it was in the past.
In Too Big to Know, David Weinberger explores how the nature of knowledge has shifted over time. In the past, traditional knowledge was closely tied to print. Academics followed a disciplined scholarly process, researching and writing papers and books—the foundation of what we consider “classic” facts. It may seem like a neat and orderly system, but Weinberger argues that this view is oversimplified, noting “The limitations of paper made facts look far more manageable than they seem now that we see them linked into our unlimited network.” Today, knowledge is no longer confined to books; it’s shaped by networks like the web. No longer written by a single expert toward a fixed conclusion, knowledge is now more of an interactive dialogue, weaving together multiple perspectives with outcomes that are fluid and changeable.
It’s a good thing that our information technology has evolved to handle the inherent messiness of thought. As Weinberger points out, “To think that knowledge itself is shaped like books is to marvel that a rock fits so well in its hole in the ground.” Yet, messiness isn’t a virtue. If print makes knowledge seem too tidy, that tidiness is also its strength. Print tames chaos by filtering out distractions, dismissing unreliable sources, and fixing reference points for evaluation. It distills knowledge from raw data, allowing for periods of consensus and informed action.
Life has always been too big to fully comprehend. I’ve written elsewhere about how Dutch immigration shaped a “people of the book.” For them, reading the Bible provided focus and refuge amidst the uncertainty and hardships of starting a new life in a strange land. While digital technologies enhance our ability to engage with the complexity of life, networks remain leaky buckets. The stability of print remains, in many ways, the gold standard for knowledge.
Last Updated on May 15, 2025 | Published: November 4, 2012