When I first read the phrase "the smartest person in the room is the room itself" in the title of the book, I immediately thought it meant that technology and the Internet have so overwhelmed society with information (so-called "facts") and wannabe "experts" that no person in the room was actually smart at all. I thought this phrase was Weinberger's cheeky way of saying that everyone in the room is so stupid that the room itself (an inanimate object) must contain more knowledge than they do.
As I started to read the book I was relieved that this wasn't going to be another one-sided "Google is making us stupid" argument. Instead, Weinberger explains what he meant on page thirteen of the prologue. The room is a collective network, much like the Internet, that combines all of the knowledge of the people within the room: the lecturer (aka "expert") and everyone present for the lecture, each of whom comes equipped with a lifetime of their own knowledge. The room then becomes a hot spot of knowledge because no single person in the room knows everything, but together they all have access to each others knowledge.
There's a flaw in this thinking, which is very similar to the flaw in the Internet and it's seemingly endless well of information. Everyone in the room may possess knowledge, but do they all possess facts? And if they do, does that make them all experts at something? Who decides what is a fact and what is not?
One of the worst uses of the Internet (or anything presented as "fact") occurs when people read something and automatically think that it is correct. The Internet has definitely made everyone an expert, and yet they may actually be another naive listener in a room with one "expert" sharing the knowledge they consider to be factual.
This doesn't mean that facts don't exist and you need to become a paranoid conspiracy theorist, but everyone should look at different aspects of a "fact" until they find what is true, or perhaps most true. In short, I encourage you to:
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