I wish there were more episodes like the Pittsburgh almanac story in Too Big to Know. Instead, Weinberger often retreats into a philosophical stance that overemphasizes the power of media technology to reshape the basic epistemological structures of the social world. This theoretical starting point -- which we might describe as a kind of Heideggarian McLuhanism -- ultimately dematerializes and dehistoricizes our notions of what it means to say that a fact is "networked." And this tendency, which I would call a tendency to see networks as coterminous with "the Internet," largely evacuates any understanding of digital power from Weinberger's analysis.

* * *

Just to be clear right from the start: there is no doubt that Too Big to Know is a smart, readable book. All too often the academic response to readable, obviously mass-market oriented books like Weinberger's is to pick nits, helpfully pointing out entire scholarly bodies of evidence that the author missed and using this lack of grounding in the literature as an excuse to toss the entire exercise out the window. Sometimes such criticism is justified, other times, it is less so. In this case, at least, readability is far from a sign of shallow thinking. There are probably hard-edged sociological reasons behind Weinberger's accessible argumentative style, but there is little doubt that he knows his stuff. Indeed, one of the failings of Too Big to Know may be that the book tries to do too much, rather than too little.

Nevertheless, if Too Big To Know is a multi-course meal, it is an ultimately unsatisfying one. Its primary flaw is its open indebtedness to a particular vision of both Heidegger and McLuhan. These commitments are central to nearly all of Weinberger's writings, from The Cluetrain Manifesto onward, and as such, it's doubtful that such an open disagreement on intellectual first principles can be easily bridged. Nevertheless, Weinberger's commitments need not be ours, and there are particularly important reasons why we might wish to avoid them.

The renaissance of Marshall McLuhan in the era of the Web is disappointing for a number of reasons, not the least of which is its rather dull obviousness. There is little surprise that the quotable, evidence-free, technology-obsessed Canadian English professor would thrive in a technology-obsessed era where pithy quotes about the deep meaning of digital devices too often stands in for evidence. McLuhan, of course, was the master theorist of the medium; beyond the over-used "medium is the message," McLuhan's major insight was to argue that socio-technological systems -- such as the media -- operate on a grand scale, largely independent of the day-to-day interest us mere mortals might have in their actual content. McLuhan's primary flaw, on the other hand, was to decouple this understanding of socio-technical system from any relationship to economics, politics, or society. As leading communications theorist James Carey put it, "McLuhan sees the principal effect [of communication technology] as impacting sensory organization and thought. McLuhan has much to say about perception and thought but little to say about institutions."