Small pieces loosely joined - David Weinberger

The creation of the Web may well be the most important technological invention since Guttenberg's printing press. If that were all, it would be a very big deal indeed. However, as David Weinberger argues in this book, the Web is something even more than that. For everyone on the planet who has a computer, or access to a computer, the Web provides access to an extra, borderless public world created and sustained by the millions of people who use it. This extra world is something unique in the history of mankind. It has no geography to hold us together, no land beneath us, no planet spinning us, no sky beckoning us. All that holds this world together is our common interest. Matter and geography drops out and we are left with only ourselves.;This title presents a thorough exploration of the profound impact this revolution is having on our most fundamental assumptions about what constitutes such basic concepts as space, time, self, knowledge, matter and togetherness. While the experience of the Web alters these traditional concepts in profound ways, the great irony, according to Weinberger, is that this experience is actually more in tune with our essential selves than the modern world we have constructed. The web is changing us all, precisely because it appeals to what is most essentially, authentically human: our need to connect. Peopled with colourful, provocative participants in this extra world, "Small Pieces Loosely Joined" is an ultimately hopeful book that aims to make us look at the web - and at life - in an entirely new way.