På konferencen Defrag holdt David Weinberger et foredrag med titlen: “The Rise of the Implicit.” His thesis is that we have a natural tendency to focus on what’s explicit, but the explicit has certain characteristics that mislead us if that is the only focus. The old media sticks things together for unnatural reasons, he said. “New media is doing the work of defragging to break the pieces apart that were stuck to together for unnatural reasons. New media lets all of the stuff fall apart. I worry we don’t pay enough attention to the implicit,” Weinberger said.
He points to links as the way to reconnect the pieces more naturally. “The Web is different. It’s about links and in that sense links are the opposite of information. Links enrich and are decentralized, personal, messy and most of all fully social,” Weinberger said. This idea is linked to the unspoken, the implicit by virtue of the language between humans, from sentences, paragraphs and punctuation to links, which point beyond the self and point to the “lumpiness” of the unsaid.
“Making content public were founding events in our culture, once in writing and then printing. Now we can make relationships among ideas and content permanent and public through links,” Weinberger said. “It is the rejoining of the world, not just information. We are writing together our world. Links are gestures to what matters to us, what is between us.”