Sarah Allen's Weblog

imperfection is the price of admission

"In the real world, perfection is held as an ideal we humans always disappoint; on the web, perfection just gets in the way." -- Small Pieces Loosely Joined

David Weinberger devotes a whole chapter to perfection: how people pursue it in the real world, but must leave it behind on the web. As my friend Max Carlson noted, giving up perfection is the price the admission. With software incompatibilities, inconsistent bandwidth and connection time, and the ubiquitous 404 error, you quickly learn that sometimes things just don’t work. Weinberger asserts that we tolerate imperfection on the web “because it’s our web, made by and for humans, it shares the characteristic that distinguishes us from the gods: fallibility.”

Paradoxically I find the more obviously human parts of the web to be more reliable, not in terms of up-time, but in finding the information that I’m looking for. One of the reasons I enjoy the recent rise in weblogs is that once I find some people who are passionate about a subject, the information on those sites is deeper, more detailed, and usually more interesting. I don’t know these people. They may not be recognized authorities on the subject, but they develop a voice of authority in a few paragraphs or a few pages. Blogging software has made it easy for these folks to update their sites more frequently and creates a simple format for writing about timely information.