Facts?

First

CLassic Facts

• Represented by Darwin with a dissecting kit
• relatively sparce
• painstaikingly discovered
• used to prove theories

1950's

Databased facts

• We thought we had lots of information
• Just under 2 billion cards
• 200Gb hard drive on a laptop
• Strictly limit
• Limit what we know, to know the world

A handful of fields, chosen & organised by a handful of people

Now

it makes sense to talk networked facts

If classic facts & databased facts are taken for granted as fundamentally isolated units of knowledge, networked facts are assumed to be part of a network

Networked facts

Networked Facts

• if you use source data
• you may as well link to it
• hyperlinks are included
• the new default
• doesn't just unify info & publishing system

Integrates people

This makes our ordinary encounter with facts very different to how it used to be

New facts

• not marching single-file contained in a book
• picked up
• splattered against a wall
• contradicted, torn, amplified, mocked
• so...

Newton's 2nd Law
On the Net, every fact has an equal & opposite reaction

Continuous, multisided, linked contradiction of every fact changes the nature & role of facts for our culture

Different?

• Facts once gave us a way to settle
• Networked facts open network disagreements
• We might miss Classic Facts
• its view of facts was based in the paper medium
• economics of paper, facts were rare & gem-like because of room

Facts in a unlimited network

• Vaccines cause autism?
• Barack Obama born in Kenya?
• Aliens walk among us, secretly?
• They have facts that support & facts that don't
• Facts impotent in the face of firmly held beliefs?

So, "I learnt that on the Internet means...?"