Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The Web has not been hyped enough. That's the startling thesis of this one-of-a-kind book that's sure to become a classic work of social commentary. Just as Marshall McLuhan forever altered our view of broadcast media, Weinberger shows that the new medium of the Web is not only altering social institutions such as business and government but, more important, is transforming bedrock concepts of our culture such as space, time, the public, and even reality itself.Weinberger introduces us to denizens of this new world, among them Zannah, whose online diary turns self-revelation into play; Tim Bray, whose map of the Web reveals what's at the heart of the new Web space; and Danny Yee and Claudiu Popa, part of the new breed of Web experts we trust despite their lack of qualifications. Through stories of life on the Web, an insightful take on some familiar (and some unfamiliar) Web sites, and a wicked sense of humor, Weinberger puts the Web into the social and intellectual context we need to begin assessing its true impact on our lives. The irony, according to Weinberger, is that this new technology is more in tune with our authentic selves than is the modern world. Funny, provocative, and ultimately hopeful, Small Pieces Loosely Joined makes us look at the Web--and at life--in a new light.From Small Pieces Loosely Joined:The Web has sent a jolt through our culture, zapping our economy, our ideas about the sharing of creative works, and possibly even institutions such as religion and government. Why? How do we explain the lightning charge of the Web? If it has fallen short of our initial hopes and fears about its transformational powers, why did it excite those hopes and fears in the first place? Why did this technology hit our culture like a bolt from Zeus?Suppose--just suppose--that the Web is a new world we're just beginning to inhabit...If the Web is changing bedrock concepts such as space, matter, time, perfection, public, knowledge, and morality--each a chapter of this book--no wonder we're so damn confused. That's as it should be. The Web is enabling us to rediscover what we've always known about being human: we are connected creatures in a connected world about which we care passionately...If this is true, then for all of the over-heated, exaggerated, manic-depressive coverage of the Web, we'd have to conclude that the Web in fact has not been hyped enough.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Preface (p. vii)
• 1 A New World (p. 1)
• 2 Space (p. 27)
• 3 Time (p. 57)
• 4 Perfection (p. 71)
• 5 Togetherness (p. 95)
• 6 Knowledge (p. 121)
• 7 Matter (p. 147)
• 8 Hope (p. 173)
• Notes (p. 197)
• Acknowledgments (p. 207)
• Index (p. 209)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Weinberger (coauthor, The Cluetrain Manifesto) mixes popular philosophy and middle-aged-white-male experience to explore his simple Internet thesis: the Web permits people to connect based on soul, not body, and the importance of the Web is not economic, but spiritual. A philosophy professor turned marketing guy turned writer, Weinberger boasts an extremely likable mainstream intellectual persona, flashes of insight and genuine literary talent. But the aspect of his personality that drives this book his first solo effort is his tendency to question. "Yes, I am undeniably a 45-55 white suburban male, but it's demeaning to see it put down on paper as if that made me like every other 45-55 white guy trapped in the suburbs," he says, in a passage about demographics gathered by scheming marketers. "And while it may be statistically true that we 45-55 white suburban males will boost our spending on erasable pens if we see a sexy babe touch one to her lips in an ad, we resent the notion that we're programmable." With touchy-feely chapter titles like "Perfection," "Togetherness," "Matter" and "Hope," Weinberger leads readers through an exploration of the Web's implications beyond Amazon.com. And if his concepts at times smack of New Age sensitivity, they are, in a way, accurate. Weinberger, a frequent commentator on NPR's All Things Considered, celebrates the Internet's gift to its users: permission to be an individual in a virtual world we can tailor to our passionate, idea-driven taste. In writing about the Web, Weinberger has written about himself his own soul and his own unwieldy and evolving comprehension of the world. Agents, David Miller and Lisa Adams. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

The World Wide Web developed rapidly during the 1990s. Columnist and radio commentator Weinberger offers a thoughtful commentary on how the Web is so different from conventional information sources. "Going to a Web site" is not really traveling, and yet it is different from checking out a book from the library. Space and time have new meanings on the Web. People have tremendous freedom presenting themselves on the Web. The Web is messy, chaotic, and rife with misinformation as well as information. In the end, in spite of spam, smut, and dubious advice, the author sees the Web as good--something that people should consider theirs--a place where one can be free, a basis for hope. This book is easy reading, and it encourages readers to reflect on what the Web means to them. Recommended for general readers, lower- and upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, and two-year technical program students. S. L. Tanimoto University of Washington

Booklist Review

Finally, as the dust of toppling dot-coms settles, we are given a levelheaded look at what our headlong embrace of the Web means to us as human beings, not investors. Weinberger uses a philosophical approach to examine how we experience different concepts--space, time, and community, for example--in both real and virtual life, and offers many provocative and exciting ideas. "Our experience of the Web is closer to the truth of our lived experience than are our ideas about our lived experience," he claims; in other words, the great, messy sprawl of cyberspace allows us to be ourselves better than the impossible ideals we measure ourselves against in real life. Examining the way we interact in this "world we've made for one another," he finds manifest evidence of our inherently caring, social natures that belies the default Western philosophy of individualism. Those who worry that our social skills decline the more we're online will find points of debate, but this exceptionally readable and often funny treatise makes strong arguments and ends with a convincing forecast for positive changes in the way we live. --Keir Graff

Kirkus Book Review

A Web visionary's largely successful attempt to place the new medium within a social and cultural context. As the publisher of the Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization, a contributor to Wired , and a commentator on NPR's All Things Considered, Weinberger is in the thick of the ever-changing brave new geography-less world of the World Wide Web. Though his subtitle is a tad premature, his presentation remains straightforward, avoiding the McLuhanesque convolutions that embellished, and often obscured, attempts to understand the previous new medium of television. Tracing Web history back to the 1993 development of Mosaic, a progenitor of Netscape, Weinberger looks at the effects the Internet has had on every institution it touches, from business, to education, to government. Terming the Web both a "wanker's paradise" and a "collective, global work of literature," the author concludes that, the dot-com implosion aside, Web hype was not "unwarranted, only misdirected." He drops tantalizing statistics regarding the Web, such as its being responsible for a 28 percent drop in TV viewing, or that at any given moment there are ten billion "bytes in flight," the equivalent of 30,000 books, in the wires of Internet infrastructure. The overall focus, however, is on the social and cultural ramifications of a medium "constantly in the throes of self-invention." Conceding that the Web is "profoundly unmanaged" by design, he goes on to describe a realm where nearness is based, not on contiguity, but on similarity of interests, where, in a paraphrase of Andy Warhol's bon mot, "everyone will be famous to fifteen people." At the opposite end of the spectrum from the pointy-headed digerati elite who decry the usurpation of the Internet by hoi polloi, Weinberger is a democrat who sees the Web not as a medium of mass stupefaction like TV but as a new and intense form of social interaction. He concludes on the hopeful note that the Web can be a "place free of what's been holding back our better selves." The premises here are ultimately neither radical nor obtuse, and readers with a general familiarity with the Web will be prepared to understand these coherent and cogent arguments.