Intranet Journal
The online resource for intranet professionals

David Weinberger's Intranet Buzz:
The Database and the Joke

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.

The Author