Sean-Ward.com

Perhaps I should make a side window for my suggested site of the moment found by using StumbleUpon. An example page would be 13.08: We Are the Web, with the subtitle of:

The Netscape IPO wasn’t really about dot-commerce. At its heart was a new cultural force based on mass collaboration. Blogs, Wikipedia, open source, peer-to-peer - behold the power of the people.

I was surprised to find myself not only glancing at the article but actually reading it. I found the following quote:

The electricity of participation nudges ordinary folks to invest huge hunks of energy and time into making free encyclopedias, creating public tutorials for changing a flat tire, or cataloging the votes in the Senate. More and more of the Web runs in this mode. One study found that only 40 percent of the Web is commercial. The rest runs on duty or passion.

There’s also a small discussion between the author and Amish farmers, who had a website to advertise their work. They used the access at the library. Awesome.

The author then goes into an outlook of the next 10 years of the Internet. He comments that it is possible for the production on the Internet to be more than the consumption, as everyone will begin to add stuff to the Internet, but they will take stuff from the Internet less. If the Internet was a business, it would fail because of that reason, but since it is not a business, it will succeed. He uses a word by Alvin Toffler, who had a concept of “society waves” that pushes older cultures and societies aside: post-industrial society replaced nuclear family society which replaced agrarian society which replaced hunter-gather society. [Mental note: look into his concepts more later.] Anyway, the word he choose to use was “prosumption“, which described “the network of social creation, the community of collaborative interaction”.

Recouping from the brief aside I just made, he then references the Internet as one machine, with tremendous computing power. He a likens the complexity of this one machine to that of the human brain, comparing links between pages to synapses. “The human brain has about 100 times [as many] - but brains are not doubling in size every few years. The Machine is.” Looking at it closer, this one machine is made up of smaller parts, which are machines themselves, made up of even smaller parts. Much like a human, the Machine has been on since it started, which would be between ten and thirty years. That’s a long time for any machine to be on.

He mentions that as the Machine grows, we will become more dependent on it for remembering things. I recall having that discussion in my Philosophy 344 class: one of the ancient Greek philosophers, I can’t think of which one, said that written word brought about the end of orally passing information on. We then talked about how modern technology was doing the same thing. A favorite series of mine, Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons, had a similar setup. Humankind has spread throughout the stars, and through the use of fictional physics, they had gates which created wormholes, allowing houses and cables and malls and people go from place to place without traveling on a spaceship. Anyway, almost no one knew how to write, and since they were always connected to this web of information (I believe it was called the datasphere), it was not hard to get information about a topic. One fateful day, the interconnectivity of those worlds is cut off, and many people perish and/or do not know what to do. This is an example that for some could show how bad connectivity such as that would be. However, another example deals with a group of travelers on a world in the outback (planets that are not part of the datasphere yet), isolated from the datasphere, away from the civilization they are familiar, form a small datasphere amongst themselves, keeping tabs on each other’s vital information and location during a sandstorm. Interconnectivity is something that people do. Most people, I should say. There are hermits who would shun human contact.

These comments have spanned the entire day here at work, as I have been working, reading, working, typing comments, et cetera. As I just finished the Wired article, I figure I should end this train of thought post. The author ended his with the following:

First moments are often like that. After the hysteria has died down, after the millions of dollars have been gained and lost, after the strands of mind, once achingly isolated, have started to come together - the only thing we can say is: Our Machine is born. It’s on.

I enjoyed the article: the concepts covered were intriguing, the items it has prompted me to look into are numerous. Once I finish the Scientific American (a special issue about the dynamics of the Earth’s innards), I think I’ll re-read Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A unified theory of the web. Perhaps I should say re(x4)-read it. I enjoy that book. An apparently, at the website for it, one can read and comment on the entire book.