There are two basic forms of information on the Web:
databases and jokes. Databases think about
information the way a paper form does. Each form
represents one record, whether it's a record of a
doctor's visit, an inning of a Little League game,
or a new employee hire. The database, in a form-like
fashion, gives you a number of standard fields to
fill in, such as Employee_Name and Starting_Salary.
But, unlike paper forms, once the information is
entered, the database enables you to retrieve the
information and organize it in ways that are
difficult for humans. For example, you can easily
ask a database of baseball innings to show you how
often your child embarrassed you at bat, which child
would have best upheld your family honor, etc.
The Web is great for that sort of information. When
you're talking to Amazon.com, for example, you're
retrieving forms about books. And when you're doing
research on digital-to-analog converters at National
Semiconductor (www.nsc.com), you're retrieving forms
about electronic components. Convenient, yes.
Powerful, yes. But that isn't enough to explain the
popularity of the Web, much less its social impact.
While the Web gives everyone the capability of
becoming a database jockey and information retrieval
specialist, the world in the mid-90s didn't decide
that retrieving information is just the coolest
thing ever and we have to wire the entire globe so
everyone can do it. It took the other form of
information: the joke.
Jokes, as everybody knows, aren't just funny. Jokes
reveal some unexpected insight or relationship -- a
link, if you will, that you didn't know was there.
The joke form of information isn't confined just to
jokes. While a database lets you find what you know
is there, jokes are about discovering what you
didn't expect. If we were only looking up what we
knew was there, we wouldn't be so excited about the
Web. It's the discovery promised in jokes that gives
the Web its charge.
The difference in the two forms isn't just in
whether the information is expected or not.
Databases contain very thin information while jokes
are fat with context. Jokes are expressed in a human
voice - you have to know how to tell a joke, but you
don't have to know how to tell a database, at least
not in the same way. Databases are constant and
reliable resources to be invoked. Jokes shine a
sudden light on the world. Databases help us;
they're efficient. Jokes delight us.
The joke form of information -- discovery of links,
human voices telling stories to delight one another
-- draws us to the Web like a fire on a cold night.
Without the joking form of information, the Web
would just be a database.
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The Author
David Weinberger writes JOHO and is one of the Ringleaders of cluetrain.com,
a manifesto of web ethics. He also provides strategic marketing
consulting to high-tech companies, writes for several magazines
(including Wired)
and is a commentator on NPR's "All Things Considered."
He was, as VP of Strategic Marketing, one of the shapers of Open
Text's intranet strategy. David sits on several conference boards
and is a member of AIIM's Emerging Technology Advisory Group. Reach
him at self@evident.com
.
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