Impressionistic transcript of David Weinberger's opening Keynote at Defrag.
The implicit seems to refer to what we don't see or what we don't know, but I think the unspoken or the unsaid is more important. We focus on the explicit, but that has certain characteristics that mislead us, and we are doing the work of defragging, bringing the pieces back together. Because the old media required us to, and the new media let us pull these pieces together. Semantic web has value in stickin the explicit together, but this is different.
Five moments of the implicit.
Reads from the poem Blue Hydrangea and then discusses some implicit things made explicit: a washed out color as in children's clothes, which no longer worn, no more can happen to, how much it makes you feel a small life's brevity. You could express this in hex or bits in a computer, in which nothing is implicit. Computers in the 1950s and early incarnations were tools of reduction. The reduced us. Informationaliation happened to human experiences such as judgement, experience, perception and sense data. Now we believe that the brain is an information processor, and one day we might think our liver is too.
The web is different, it is about links. Links are the opposite of information. They enrich, add, open ended decentralized, in panguage, personal, messy and unrequited. They are a type of writing, so of course they are social. The web is the counter to the age of Informationaliation. A rabbi said, "dogs becomes en-soled by living with humans." We are en-soling computers. Hal grew up alone.
Second moment. I can't tell you all the implicit things I know about my children. If I could, something was wrong and they would only be stereotypes. We can't say everything about them, but on facebook I have to friend them and typify them. It gets worse, I have to fill out my profile. We are filling out forms again! Fold spindle mutilate. And yet, we en-sole Facebook.
Judath Donath talks about this in terms of signalling. What is being signaled is too rich to just be in signal. It is a gesture Raising a fist on an olymic medal stand is still being infused in our culture.
Third moment. We are walking down the street and we think we are giving off information. We used to view it more like a river, with characteristics and eddies. No public outcry about giving off information and having it recorded. We trust the government about what rights we have to pay information to.
Forth, potentialities. Statistically most acorns rot in the ground, but we know more. "If you can dream it, you can be it." There has got to be a better way to give your children hope without lying to them! To help them understand potential. We morn lost potential in the (above) poem. Potential is so valuable to us, even if fulfilled. Amazon recommends is one way of defragging, but it is not the most important and deepest way of doing it. We can teach computers about potential, but you have to teach them about all the potentials we understand. Impossible to utter everything you know. Syche (sp?) could pass the turing test on children's clothings, but we know it would miss the lumpiness of possibility and why mere probabilities lump up. The _why_ of lumpiness.
Fifth, in the poem the piece made explicit is the least important. What matters is that they make a connection, which is not made explicit. The decomposition can reveal the truth of what is there. What we care about is what divides possibility and potential. What is between us is what we don't speak, and I mean this literally.
It is language that is between us fundamentally, we have all of that, even in translation we have it. And now we have links, which are guestures, which point beyond themselves. We have links that have persistence and are permanent, which is incredibly important. Being able to make content permanent is a foundning event of our culture, and now we can make the relationships between content permanent. They are not mere connections, they are the rejoining of the world. Giving these relationships permanence has incredible value.
Our brains discriminate edges, but we are fascinated by the transcendence of edges. They are splits and where we join. The edge may be precise, and thus simple. But the value of the edge is to see the complex, the loose edge, the potential. That is the unspoken in the edge. Defrag, both the conference and the generational effort, is finding the ways in which the world matters together.
