The Internet: A Self Organising System?
June 15th, 2007Where would we be without the internet? Could we live without Google for a day even? Well they tried that and found there are plenty of other engines out there worth looking at. But the real question for me was not whether we could live without Google for a day but whether Google is still the future of the internet.
This is a more challenging question. As Branton Kenton-Dau, my colleague over at VortexDNA, notes the internet is a self organising system constantly feeding off the energy provided by creators and imaginators. So far Google has kept this energy focused through itself by either developing new services or simply buying in what they like.
There is no problem with big…..big can be good but big requires a lot more energy to self-sustain. The beauty of the web is that it reflects demands so quickly. It is essentially democratic in its processing, beautiful and free…well not quite. It has the capacity to be controlled and regulated which we have seen all too frequently.
But i have a feeling that the internet as we know it may reorganise itself by deconstructing and coming back to life in a different form. This may well be opposite to what we have now where we go out to look for things. In the next stage of development things will come looking for us. We will be the filter for our web and we will be the center of it.
There will be no more ranking only relevance decided by us. We will configure the web to ourselves with no one interfering with or controlling what we see. I’m excited about this vision because it offers so much.
How we get there is anyone’s guess but that’s the beauty of systems.
Tags: e-democracy, google, internet, semantic web, systems, web 2.0, web 3.0
June 15th, 2007 at 7:01 pm
Of course the internet is a self-organizing system. The Usenet reorganized into the early internet, gradually connection developed such as archie, and WAIS, and then CERN gave us http which spawned web search engines, and the need to organize things semantically with RDF, and the newer tools to organize these organization tools such as GRDDL and POWDER.
All this has come about because the lunatics have been in charge of the asylum, i.e. techies like those who have contributed to the technical protocols at the IETF and even normal people have a say in the internet’s directions by becoming Global Members of ISOC (The Internet Society – join free of charge).
If the commercial world gets too much control, then things will become ossified.
It’s both better and worse than I imagined it back in the early days (I was one of the first to move a comp.* FAQ to the newfangled HTML format).
You might also like to read a 1994 paper Community Networks and the Internet: Rethinking Policy in an Era of Geodesic Access that mentions a 1992 paper Why Are Resources Free On The Internet? by Chin Chee-Kai that mentions me twice, but one of the mentions makes me quite pleased:
June 15th, 2007 at 7:22 pm
Oh forgot to show how my FAQ developed as a good illustration of how things gradually get organized: first as an regularly posted ASCII 1993-02 version to collect the most common requests I was always answering, then I proposed the move to HTML (but most wanted plan ASCII 1993-11, finally I announced the move to HTML over HTTP, and by 1999, the wayback machine had started archiving the web.
Given that I’ve been posting in a public forum since 1992, that kinda makes me a veteran blogger. (And my style went to the sarcastic even then).
June 15th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
Darn! A comment got lost. They key part was that ISOC (the internet society) is something anyone interested in the development of the internet and society.
Why Join?
Public Policy
Code of Conduct
Join (free)
This 1992 article from a guy in the Singapore gov answers Why Are Resources Free on the Internet?. Look carefully and you’ll see two reasons from me. For the one I’m happiest about, search for “karma”.
The downloadable textbook chapter includes links to the 1992 paper and a lot of other influential papers on culture, commercialism and the web.
June 18th, 2007 at 2:06 am
[...] on from my previous piece I have just viewed a couple of interesting videos projecting how the web may develop in the future [...]