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What Information Was

What Information Was

David Weinberger, Berkman Center

Tuesday, November 10, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor

RSVP required for those attending in person (rsvp@cyber.harvard.edu)
This event will be webcast live at 12:30 pm ET and archived on our site shortly after.

It's puzzling that even though we named an age after information, very few people can tell you what information is. And the ones with the clearest answers are often defining information in the technical sense, which is not the sense in which the culture took it up. In this session, we'll look back at information, trying to understand what about it led us to embrace it as the dominant -- paradigmatic -- way of understanding ourselves and our world. David Weinberger will present an informal sketch of a direction, suggesting that we leaped into information because it reflected a long-held but squirrely metaphysics. There will be lots of time for open discussion.

About David

David Weinberger is on the Fellowship Advisory Board of the Berkman Center and began his "career" in the late '70s teaching philosophy at New Jersey's Stockton State College for five years. (He has a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Toronto.) During this time he maintained a steady freelance writing of humor, reviews and intellectual and academic articles, publishing in places as diverse as The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Smithsonian, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, and TV Guide. David is co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and and author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined and Everything Is Miscellaneous.

Links

Download media from this event here.

Past Event
Nov 10, 2009
Time
12:30 PM - 1:30 PM