Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory Of The Web

by David Weinberger

The Web has not been hyped enough. That's the startling thesis of this one-of-a-kind book that's sure to become a classic work of social commentary. Just as Marshall McLuhan forever altered our view of broadcast media, Weinberger shows that the new medium of the Web is not only altering social institutions such as business and government but, more important, is transforming bedrock concepts of our culture such as space, time, the public, and even reality itself. Weinberger introduces us to denizens of this new world, among them Zannah, whose online diary turns self-revelation into play; Tim Bray, whose map of the Web reveals what's at the heart of the new Web space; and Danny Yee and Claudiu Popa, part of the new breed of Web experts we trust despite their lack of qualifications. Through stories of life on the Web, an insightful take on some familiar (and some unfamiliar) Web sites, and a wicked sense of humor, Weinberger puts the Web into the social and intellectual context we need to begin assessing its true impact on our lives. The irony, according to Weinberger, is that this new technology is more in tune with our authentic selves than is the modern world. Funny, provocative, and ultimately hopeful, Small Pieces Loosely Joined makes us look at the Web -- and at life -- in a new light. From Small Pieces Loosely The Web has sent a jolt through our culture, zapping our economy, our ideas about the sharing of creative works, and possibly even institutions such as religion and government. Why? How do we explain the lightning charge of the Web? If it has fallen short of our initial hopes and fears about its transformational powers, why did it excite those hopes and fears in the first place? Why did this technology hit our culture like a bolt from Zeus? Suppose -- just suppose -- that the Web is a new world we're just beginning to inhabit . . . If the Web is changing bedrock concepts such as space, matter, time, perfection, public, knowledge, and morality -- each a chapter of this book -- no wonder we're so damn confused. That's as it should be. The Web is enabling us to rediscover what we've always known about being we are connected creatures in a connected world about which we care passionately . . . If this is true, then for all of the over-heated, exaggerated, manic-depressive coverage of the Web, we'd have to conclude that the Web in fact has not been hyped enough.

Genres: Nonfiction, Technology, Internet, Web, Sociology, Philosophy, Computer Science

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[Mikal · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a useful philosophical narrative for the web. To develop a web based application, to use the web for purposes of organization or to use the tools of the present day web is to build, organize, or navigate the world David Weinberger describes.

Small pieces is a useful treatise that loses itself from time to time. David's work is a cultural examination of the web- based on how it is similar or dissimilar to the lebenswelt (life-world). It's this examination that serves to be the glass ceiling of the essay. In order to define the web, the author inadvertently takes on the responsibility of defining the world.

Mr. Weinberger takes this on by examining the web through seven components: space, time, perfection, togetherness, knowledge, matter, and hope. These components while interrelated seem arbitrary, and I'm not sure why the author didn't build on other philosophical frameworks of the lebenswelt (a term the author doesn't use but is clearly referencing).

Excluding this significant drawback, the themes are loosely joined (but definitely not small pieces). And sadly the author takes up the challenge of building an argument by disproving other arguments. That's a serious challenge, because to disprove an argument assumes its a logical argument and not a paradox. So much of each section is spent disproving paradoxes as if they are logical arguments for example: the real world is experienced on a chronometric timescale leads to the perspective that the web world is not. We know that both statements are not entirely true. However that does not mean both are false.

Small pieces is best enjoyed in companion reading the book "where the action is" by Paul Dourish. Though he doesn't use this language the premise is that the web is a 'ready to hand' medium (we interact with it as an extension of our lebenswelt, losing sight of the bits and pixels that intermediate the interaction).

And with the exception of the time and matter section Mr. Weinberger makes his points. Particularly the points about perfection resonate in the voice of the modern corporation. The emphasis on placemaking too has a core value in examining how the products we develop foster a sense of place and that factors that contribute to it. The section on knowledge portends the crowdsourcing movement and the value of metadata. And finally the section on matter is really a corollary to the section on space; highlighting that each place gains from meaning and meaning gains from context. At the books conclusion, the premise and title "small pieces loosely joined" are all but lost in favor of a premise that the web world is the world as humans intend it.

To get the most of this book, the ideas must be first taken at face value and only debated in reflection. To do otherwise would be to lose sight of where the book leads you because the driver took a "wrong first turn".

[Richard Seltzer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Are you feeling burnt-out, frustrated, tired of everything having to do with the Internet? Then for you, Small Pieces Loosely Joined could be like a revival meeting, giving you a taste of the old-time religion.

If there were a church of the Internet, this would be one of its sacred books, celebrating the Web as a social place, rather than technology. As David Weinberger puts it, "The Web is a social place that we humans constructed voluntarily out of a passion to show how the world looks to us." p. 166

Weinberger emphasizes the human and paradoxical aspects of the Web -- how we behave and interact there and what that says about what it means to be human.

He ruminates about the implications of what we've been doing on the Web for the last nine years. The Web isn't just technology. It connects people to people in new ways, leads to new behavior, leads to new ways of thinking about what is possible in terms of human relationships. It opens the possibility for you to be a creative individual while at the same time being part of a mass crowd. He clearly articulates thoughts that many of us have probably glimpsed before in a fog, and then he digs a little deeper into what that means, and tickles our brains with intriguing conclusions.

He starts with the firmly held belief that the Internet changes everything; and then asks, over and over again, in what ways is that true?

He starts with the assumption that, in the long term, the dot-com boom and crash doesn't matter much. The Internet has affected us in far more profound ways than stock prices and get-rich-quick schemes that failed. As he puts it, "If the Internet sometimes feels like a Gold Rush, that's due more to the rush than to the gold." (p. 59)

Weinberger dares to wonder about matters that many of us have left unexamined since college -- the nature of knowledge, the destiny of man, the importance of passion. He creates a context in which he can actually say something so bizarre and outrageous as "... the Web's architecture itself is fundamentally moral," p. 183, and not only do you know what he means -- you believe him.

The subtitle -- "a Unified Theory of the Web" -- is totally irrelevant. There is no theory here, and certainly (thankfully) nothing is unified. Rather, this is an insightful meditation on the nature of the Internet, delivered with style and humor, together with religious awe at this phenomenon that brings out unexpected potential of mankind.

Now don't get the idea that this is a zealot's view through rose-colored glasses. Weinberger doesn't overlook the faults and problems. But rather he celebrates the very imperfection. For instance:

"On the Web, perfection is scary." p. 72
"... as Tim Berners-Lee, the Web's inventor is reported to have said, the 'Web will always be a little bit broken.' We are, too." p. 76
"The imperfection of the Web isn't a temporary lapse; it's a design decision. It flows directly form the fact that the Web is unmanaged and uncontrolled so that it can grow rapidly and host innovations of every sort. The designers weighed perfection against growth and creativity, and perfection lost. The Web is broken on purpose." p. 79
"... the design assumption of the Internet is that it's an imperfect world." p.79
" The Web actually revels in mistakes, errors, howlers, slips, and foibles." p. 85

The section about perfection and imperfection-- my favorite part of the book -- concludes:

"The Web celebrates our imperfection, ludicrous creatures that we are. Its juice comes from being as many points of view as people and as many ways of talking as there are Web pages. The Web is where we can air our viewpoints, experiment, play, and fail, and then get right back on our feet and try again. It is not headed towards agreement. Ever. There isn't' one way of thinking or talking or behaving on the Web, and if there were, who'd want to go? The Web would be just a large 'information resource', a place where we find answers. But the Web is far more interesting. It will never be perfect -- complete, final, total, true without exception, good without hesitation. It is, therefore, a genuine reflection of our imperfect human nature, and a welcome relief from the anal-perfectionism imposed on so much of our real-world lives." p. 94

Weinberger keeps asking, from a variety of perspectives -- what is the Web? And spiced up with some clever and very quotable turns of phrase, he arrives at some outlandish and very perceptive conclusions, which he expresses in pithy sound-bytes:

"We are the true 'small pieces' of the Web, and we are loosely joining ourselves in ways that we're still inventing." p. x
"It's not a container waiting to be filled; it is more like a book that is being written." p. 45
"...what holds the Web together isn't a carpet of rock but the world's collective passion." p. 56
"The Web reminds us that the fundamental unit of time isn't a moment, it's a story, and the string that holds time together isn't mere proximity of moments but our interest in the story." p. 59
"... it's as if as we're trying to fill every available temporal niche on the Web with new types of talking." p. 62
"We're more like the fish than the fisherman: we're interested in what hooks us." p. 66
"Name a reason a person might want to communicate with another and you'll find someone using the Web that way." p. 82
"What would it mean if we could replace the faceless masses with the face-ful masses?" p. 100
"... on the Web, everyone will be famous to fifteen people." p. 104
" On the Web, the community is defined by interest, not geography, and there is no natural boundary to how large the circle of fame can grow..." p. 104
" If the real-world public reduces us to our lowest common denominator, the Web public consists of an enormous mass of people who are visible only insofar as they are individuals with something to say." p. 105
" [The Web] ... is a complex overlapping, ever-shifting set of individuals who have organized themselves into groups of every sort, including some that are only now being invented." p. 108
"... the Web consists of a mass that refuses to lose its individual faces." p. 115
" On the Web, each person is present only insofar as she has presented herself in an individual expression of her interests: many small faces, each distinct within the multitude. And since being on the Web is a voluntary activity, we are forced to face the excruciating fact that we spend so much real-world energy denying: not only do we live in a shared world, but we like it that way. You could build a new destiny for your species on an idea as radical as that." p. 120
"... irony is the Web's middle name." p. 139
"The Web is a written world. The 300 million people on the Web are its authors." p. 145
"... put a document on the Web and it explodes. rather than being self-contained, it becomes hyperlinked. A page without hyperlinks is literally a dead-end on the Web. But this is most remarkable, for it means that now documents get at least some of their value not from what they contain but from what they point to." p. 170
"The message of the Web as a medium is this: Ultimately, matter doesn't matter. If we can be together so successfully in a world that has no atoms, no space, no uniform time, no management, and no control, then maybe we've been wrong about what matters in the real world in the first place." p. 174
"Like a language, the Web enables us to meet not in distance but in meanings." p. 193
"Unlike the real world, though, there's no nature in this new world, nothing into which we are born except what we have made for one another. Unlike the real world, we aren't thrown into it but enter voluntarily, the clicking of our mice like knocks on a door. Unlike the real world, the new world of the Web is thoroughly and inalienably ours." p. 193

Read it. Enjoy it. Be born again with new faith in the potential of the Internet and of mankind.

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 4 out of 5]

Think about the internet in 2002. No Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, 4chan, Reddit or mobile anything. eBay was huge, as was Yahoo, Wikipedia was just a year old, the hottest meme was 'All Your Base Are Belong to Us' and the DotCom Bust had dropped napalm on a host of bad ideas. Weinberger takes us back that time, when he tries to explain how the web works.

Part of it, which might be exotic to surfers circa 2002, is common knowledge to pretty much anybody who isn't dead today; the blend of anonymity and authenticity that characterizes the multiple interactions that make up the web. But Weinberger draws a possibly erroneous connection between the distributed architecture of routers, and the distributed architecture of sites. The homebrewed, stitched together, hobbysites he writes about are very different from the slick, siloed internet that we experience today.

An interesting, if slightly outdated, philosophical look at the web.

[寿理 宮本 · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought this would be a nice educational book, or at least a shift from all the trash isekai I've been reading lately. Thing is, it IS about another world, but one that quickly arrived on the scene and caused some panic in the author* in the usual way that an up-and-coming technology threatens to make various jobs obsolete even as they create exciting** new ones.

As it is, this was written basically in the infancy of what we know of the World Wide Web,*** such that it feels like reading a book on New Math. At one point, one of the consultants posits that the Internet/Web must have as much as three to five GIGABYTES of information going through it on a daily basis! Wow! That's approximately ONE day's worth of e-mail I handle at work, for a single company out of MILLIONS today!

What makes this unimpressive reading *24 years later* (yikes!) is the way technology has rapidly advanced as theorised by Moore's Law, so information about computers in particular becomes outdated almost as soon as a book about them becomes published. Possibly sooner!

Beyond that, it reads mostly as an anthropological study of how this "new world" without physical presence and seemingly without limitations has affected society. In that respect, it's sort of interesting, but it's also not terribly informative (yet?). Like, okay, I hadn't thought about how Web life can be picked up and put down at will, vs. anything done in person has to be done on a schedule—to resume your gym workout after leaving the gym, you have to go BACK to the gym. Nowadays in particular, you can even resume activities from your phone (assuming data and/or Wi-Fi access), though this isn't as big a thing in the book's time.

But that's also a little bit like an post-menopause person reading a book on periods (other than to vet the book for a younger reader): It's a lot of stuff that should already be familiar if not intimately so. Sure, there's no doubt going to be SOME information that will be, like, "Well, I wish I had known THAT sooner!" but for the most part it's old news.

Like, this excerpt:

If you want to visit Bill's home page to try this out, he'll tell you to type "cheswick" into the address box at the top of your browser, as if it were built with his address specially encoded in it.² In reality, he's relying on the fact that some browsers automatically fill in the "www." before and ".com" after a single word.

The trouble is, besides the page lacking the illusion the passage describes at first (try "this" out), there are ZERO browsers I'm aware of that will do exactly this anymore. All of them will either search for the term (user-friendly) or give an error (doubtful this happens in this day and age but possible if the entry is "bad" enough).

Also, semi-personal, a mention of the Zero Wing phenomenon (without actually NAMING Zero Wing, or that ONE bad translation of the opening cinematic was more popular than the entire rest of the game)—something I was also enamoured with at the time but finally learned about from my spouse (who HAD played the game and was annoyed that this was the single most popular thing about the entire genre).

The Zero Wing thing in addition to some of the other anecdotes described sort of highlight the informality of the book as a whole—the thesis of Chapter 4: "Perfection": the Web is so great BECAUSE it isn't perfect, unlike the uncanny flawlessness that corporations strive to create as an image of themselves. If the Web had to be perfect to be used, there wouldn't be any. Instead—especially now, with A.I. slop filling it—the Web is composed of endless content created by imperfect users (and even more imperfect LLM garbage).

But I feel like the point got lost somewhere down the line; as such, I find myself increasingly tired when trying to power through even to the next mid-chapter break, because it reads like an Anthony Bourdain article, a food review but instead of food, this strange new thing called the World Wide Web. Or a rambling autobiography collecting a few thoughts together but otherwise not coming to a conclusion.

I don't know. Horribly outdated by leaps and bounds, but I guess interesting in the way of chronicling the first(-ish) experiences of the Web. Might be an interesting read for Computer Science students?

*as per the prologue

**a much-overused term at the time of the writing—2002!

***WWW being used interchangeably with Internet, when "Web" means sites like this and Internet means e-mail and the like

²Note as per the book is that the main www.cheswick.com website now links to the Cheswick family pages, of which Bill's page is one, and that the McCollough effect is now at https://www.cheswick.com/ches/project...

[Martin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't enjoy this as much as I thought I would. I am a big fan of his previous book, Everything Is Miscellaneous, but this book was far more philosophical and abstract than I was expecting.

The author looks at how the Internet changes some of our long held abstract concepts such as time, space, matter and togetherness. It was interesting, just not as relevant as i had hoped. I'm still looking forward to reading Weinberger's most recent book, Too Big to Know.

[Hana Carpenter · Rating 2 out of 5]

A time capsule of technologist optimism. This book is a poignant read; so many of the author's ambitions for the future of the Internet failed to come true. If you want to see what potential this medium held when it was young and the world was bright, this book is useful. I wouldn't take it much more seriously than that, though.

[Erin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had to put this one down. I like these sorts of books to be either really current or really technical and academic, but this was neither. The style of writing was kind of entertaining, but there just wasn't anything new or groundbreaking that I haven't read or considered before.

[Jenaya · Rating 1 out of 5]

Hopelessly dated. Useless to me, even for a Writing 121 class.

[Derek · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book has been sitting on my shelf for a long time. I finally took it down and read it and boy, a lot has changed since it was written. I thought the author had a lot of interesting things to say and I hate to give it only two stars. My rating doesn't reflect the quality of the author's arguments or his skill as a writer. It's just that in 2021 the book didn't hold my interest as well as it would have in 2001 and in many ways came off seeming naive. It was written before YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc. It was written before smartphones. Heck, it was written before the first iPod. It was written before a reality television star was elected president. It was written before a worldwide pandemic. It's weird to say this, but even though 9-11 happened while the author was writing this book, it feels like it was a simpler world then. So many times when the author wrote about the incredible, limitless new world that the internet was creating, I ended up feeling a bit sad. The author writes things like, "The Web gives us nowhere to hide from our caring nature," and "We're sharing the new world of the Web because that's the type of creature we are. We are sympathetic, thus moral. We are caring, thus social." I probably would have agreed with this in 2001, but it's hard to feel it now, sorry. Deep down, I hope I still believe it, but after the rise of Trump and the whole experience of the pandemic, it's hard to have a lot of faith in humanity anymore.

The internet was a Pandora's box that we can't unopen and of course there aren't a lot of people who would willingly go back to the time before the internet, but I do wish that it had brought out the best of humanity in the ways the author envisioned it would.

[Charles · Rating 2 out of 5]

“Unlike the real world, the world of programs is perfectly knowable, perfectly predictable, and perfectly controllable.” -page 79.

The author of this quote has either never spent time working on real programs, or is so radically oversimplifying to make his point that the point itself is irrelevant. This quote highlights one of the two main problems I had with this book.

The first is in the intent of this book, or what it aims to achieve. The book is pitched as a philosophical inquiry of what the web “is.” Unfortunately, there’s neither technical expertise to explain the design principles of the web, and how that might inform the web’s philosophy, nor is there really that much connection to philosophy. Various philosophers are name-checked, e.g. Heidigger, but the grounding of the an emergent “philosophy of the web” is not really contrasted to any classical philosophical doctrine, although opportunities to do so are everywhere. As such, there’s no real rigor in any of the analysis; it’s more like having a long conversation with a reasonably smart person who’s just really interested in academic noodling.

This brings me to my second main issue of the book. The examples and support for the author’s positions barely rise above the level of anecdote. Rather than blithely expounding on a small snippet of a chat room dialogue, the author could have done something a little more comprehensive. Examples seem incredibly dated and one-off, and this book has not aged well at all. This is too bad, because if the book had a bit more depth and rigor, it could have aged fantastically well.

[Pat Villaceran · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was created years ago, but it's evidently more relevant now. With social media and the culture of busy thumbs, Small Pieces tackles the innovation behind what we now call as everyday "needs."

[Tommaso Moro · Rating 4 out of 5]

A metaphysics of the web. Written 20+ years ago and yet very relevant today! I could really tell that Weinberger was trained as a philosopher, and I think that is the strength of this book. It’s really rare to read analyses of the web / tech from a philosophical perspective of this kind! Loved it

[David Snook · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really deep, and surprisingly relevant even in 2017, considering the pace of technology.

[Jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Only on the web does a book 12 years old feel like ancient history. In many respects, Weinberger was prescient, identifying trends that have become more and more powerful (e.g., one passage could be seen as predicting the rise of Wikipedia, and another the advent of the currently omnipresent "Like" button). Even more often, he provides insights that are still deep and thought-provoking.

Weinberger is a philosopher by training, and this book is strongest when Weinberger focuses on philosophy. For example, he argues that the web is a push back against the turn toward realism in society. He argues that the web is a completely constructed space, without the constraints of the real world, and the fact that we can find such meaning and purpose through that sort of "unreal" environment says something about what our real needs and desires are.

At times, the book is overly technological deterministic, and at times Weinberger makes claims about the nature of the web that may have been true 12 years ago, but feel less true today (e.g., today's web is much more organized around real-world friends and less around interests). However, I find his argument that using the Internet subtly changes the way we see the world to be both persuasive and important. Just because the Internet isn't "changing everything" rapidly before our eyes doesn't mean that there it isn't influencing culture in really important ways.

Overall, an important and interesting book. Should be required reading for anyone interested in the cultural impact of the internet.

[Jarrodtrainque · Rating 5 out of 5]

David Weinberger's Small Pieces Loosely Joined does not merely celebrate the World Wide Web; it attempts to make a case that the institution has completely remodeled many of the world's self-perceptions. The book does so entertainingly, if not convincingly, and is a lively collection of epigrammatic phrases (the Web is "'place-ial' but not spatial";"on the Web everyone will be famous to 15 people"), as well as illustrations of these changes. There are intriguing assertions: that the Web is "broken on purpose" and that its many pockets of erroneous information and its available forums for disputing, say, manufacturers' hyperbole, let people feel more comfortable with their own inherent imperfections. At other times the book seems stale: it declares that the Web has disrupted long-held axioms about time, space, and knowledge retrieval and that it has dramatically rearranged notions of community and individuality. Weinberger's analysis, though occasionally facile and too relentlessly optimistic and overstated, is surely destined to be the subject of furious debate in chat rooms the cyber-world over. --H. O'Billovich

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory Of The Web was as philosophical as it sounds. The view of the web presented here is very abstract, focusing on the way the web has (according to the author) caused people to re-define fundamental concepts such as space, time and togetherness. I found a lot of the evidence he offered in support of these views self-evident although I'm still not sure I agree with his assertion that we view time differently because of the internet. I do, however, agree with his final point which is that the internet in many ways allows people to interact in a more intuitive way than we can in the real world. I think the book would have been better had he focused more on this point throughout.

Read more here...

[Roger K. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Books about the internet typically don't age well. It is impressive how relevant this book still is, even more than a decade after it was written. It shares many themes with The Netocrats and will appeal to anyone that has read that excellent work.

Weinberger builds on the Cluetrain Manifesto to explore how the internet and Web have redefined space, time, and ourselves. My main takeaway was that the main appeal of the internet and Web are that they are a place where we can be more ourselves - creative, flawed, connected, social, fluid. In other words, human.

While some of the examples have become a bit fossilized, this is still worth reading for anyone interested in where all of this online activity is taking us.

[Jen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Entertaining and informative read on the implications of the Internet- how it is/will change the world, society, the way people think. Very interesting, this book made me re-think the way I view the Internet, realize some of its possibilities (e-books), hate it both a little less and a little more. Basically, it opened my eyes about something I take for granted and made me realize the huge, fundamental changes in society that the Internet has made possible. Fascinating stuff, written lightly and easy to take in. Definitely recommended if you're into social change and the Internet.

[Joshua Bloom · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great high level look at what the Web means now and what it could mean in the future. Mr. Weinberger brings lots of great analysis to the social and societal reasons for the explosion and popularity of the Web.

Though there are references to and discussions of technology, this is not a technical book. This book is focused on the emotional and personal reasons that so many people are using the Web.

Read it. Don't wait.

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Almost too touchy-feely for me to handle at times. Good ideas, though many are repeated in "Everything is Miscellaneous" on a more granular level. Still good - Weinberger's a great writer who weaves good analogies and good story-telling into a bigger picture.

[Darius · Rating 5 out of 5]

10 years ago, this book kinda blew my mind. So tonight I was looking for another book to read and pulled this down from the shelf to read again. I'll also be farming some quotes for my Secret Project, while I'm at it.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is THE BEST BOOK I'VE READ in at least five years. If you're interested in information, media, the internet, &/or culture. This one is for you.

[rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

it's not about the internet. it's about the way we connect to one another.

[Christopher Filkins · Rating 3 out of 5]

To the uninitiated this piece is likely a great fit. Unfortunately most of what it contains has long ago been incorporated into my thinking.

[Jack Vinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

http://blog.jackvinson.com/archives/2...

[Gabe Mounce · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was really interesting from the perspective of how the "networks" and computer networks in particular facilitate collaboration.

[Dlangendorf · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my early favorites on the web. Thought provoking. An author and web observer not too full of himself as many are.

[Megan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not bad. I like the way the chapters were set up. Good conversational tone, too.

[Susan · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's outdated and there's little here that you don't already know about the internet.

I found his glib style annoying.

[Cal Desmond-Pearson · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the best books I have read about the Web.