The Social Revolution: Why The New Web Matters

[I gave this talk at the Next08 conference a few weeks ago, in Hamburg.]

What is the web worth?

How would you go about valuing it, if you had to? Is it worth all the tea in china? If Google wanted to buy the whole thing, what would it cost? Every blog post, spam comment, Wikipedia entry, and hyperlink: what would we charge if Martians arrived and wanted to buy it?

The hardware involved is incalculable, and no reliable numbers exist. We can’t even begin to estimate how much we have spent on it. IDC calculated that 27 million servers had been deployed by the end of 2005, growing at an increasing rate of 3 or more million per year.

Some have estimated that something on the order of 8 B USD was spent powering the servers alone, worldwide. This was about the same as we spend for powering televisions, globally, and growing much faster.

On a crude level, we might compare it to television, which is telling. In the US, every hour that people spend online, is an hour not spent watching television. But this transcends an advertising-based valuation of clicks and eyeballs, because the web is not being created like television shows: it’s not being developed by hollywood.

It is being built by us, for us. And it is being built without blueprints, without any centralized approval, without even any general agreement on what it is for.

The big story of the web isn't the props - the servers, networks, ten trillion web sites, and all the information lying around in databases and in HTML - but what people are saying to each other and how we have been changed as a result.

We are creating the Web to happen to ourselves.

Apologies. It was blogging that did this to me. No neat conclusions. A barrage of conjecture, wisecracks, and one-liners, disguised as a presentation.

My work is social tools, but my goals lie beyond.

Giant borgesian hypertext document, where we wander by clicking links, flitting from place to place like the flying dutchman. An endless labyrinth where you can wander endlessly, never knowing the sum of the uses that are being made of the materials. How could you know?

Where’s the juice? Where’s the life? Where are the people?

Perhaps a fitting vision for Tim Berners-Lee, as a way to manage research papers. The email and webpage era of the Web.

We could simply count the pages and the number of users, and look at web 1.0 from the perspective of hypothetical research efficiency: finding snippets of information, and clipping them, and then getting back to our work in the ‘real world’ offline.

But something happened…

“Our specialist and fragmented civilization is suddenly experiencing an instantaneous reassembling of all its mechanical bits into an organic whole. This is the new world of the global village.” - Marshall McLuhan

We began to use the web as a means to shape ourselves, to shape our culture, to change our aspirations and as a place for their realization.

The shift in time and space: McLuhan knew that our perception of the world is based on the properties of the media that we use to make sense of it.

The original vision of the web was a document, the web of pages, but what has come on top of that is a web of people, connecting to each other, conversing in blogs, social networks, video and photo sharing sites, dating services, forums, and a seemingly infinite and inexhaustible number of new ways to commune and communicate.

People have found each other, person to person. And even though mass media outlets have moved onto the web, their influence and power is waning.

Newspapers, mass media journalism, the pre-web music business, all of the established media have been hollowed out by the defection of the people formerly known as the audience, us, who have streamed onto the web, and away from the forms of old.

We have created something altogether new, cobbled together from bits of the old, like a marauding tribe of nomads using the bricks from an ancient, deserted temple to make the foundation of a new city.

All the media that matter are being built on a new basis: the participation of the inhabitants. They are mashing up what came before, and spinning new magic from the old, like a giant mosaic assembled from bits of broken china.

As you wander in the new web, you can move into any corner of it and find people directly interacting with other people, making sense of their own concerns. Knitting, lute playing, whether Hilary will or won’t, or how best to help the stricken in [fill in the name of the most recent disaster]. In every nook or cranny, there are people talking, writing, making muxtapes, cross-fertilizing, and making a mess of the place. This is the sprawl at the edge of the web, and increasingly, its starting to look like all edge.

As the edge grows, the center dissolves. Mainstream journalists begin to act like bloggers, editors begin to drop the veneer of objectivism, and immediate, first person voice becomes the standard not some radical minority.

And the world, once the subject of conversation, is itself changed when so many have changed their beliefs, either explicitly or at a level below awareness.

I am made greater by the sum of my connections, and so are my connections
It’s mostly connections

Network economics

“on the Web everyone will be famous to 15 people” - David Weinberger

Trends: fragmenting as innovations increase, and specialized networks get deeper. We are going to be connected to everyone, but we will have to switch contexts like traveling across town by subway, bus, taxi, and skates.

Albert-László Barabási’s Linked, the author explains that the origin of the “six degrees of separation” notion that underlies all social networking theory was the brain child of a Hungarian writer, Frigyes Karinthy. In 1929, Karinthy published his forty-sixth book, a collection of short stories entitled “Everything Is Different” (Minden masképpen van), which is now out of print and apparently lost to us.

This is the world that instant messaging networks presaged,even back in the late 90s when hundreds of millions of users are logging into a service like AIM and sending billions of messages everyday, it became clear to some of us that we were moving rapidly into a world where the web was going to be the human bloodstream, where everything that was important would show up first.

And we are moving toward a time of even faster growth, with a growing fragmentation of worlds. We are not going to see a single AOL reality nor Google: but tens of thousands of lesser, overlapping, and mutually self-reinforcing small worlds. People have dozens of sorts of personal affiliations, and that characteristic of human connection will lead to the topology of the web, just like the properties of wind and water shape the face of the Earth. The form of the wiring in our heads -- the way we interact, how we track who is important to us, and the ways we pass information through human networks -- turns out to trump the protocols of the Internet hardware.

Once again, the Web is a solution to the problem we pose to ourselves: we have made it to invent ourselves.

A world of bottom up belonging, radiating outward, from person to person

Good title, got people pissed off. The paradox is that to connect with others, through whom we define ourselves, we have to start by asserting who we are, what we like, need, want. It seems selfish, but it is aspirational as much as anything else. We may seem self-obsessed on the web, but at the core, we aren’t really there to talk about stamp collecting or photography, we aren’t there for the places we seem to inhabit online, and not even -- in the final analysis -- for the specific others that we connect to. We are searching for a reason to be, to be linked into relationships where it would matter if we stopped coming back, where we can become ourselves through others.

It’s a net, not something neat and clean. There is a wonderful swing to human interaction on the Web, but it’s not democratic at the core. No one is in charge, but a small number of people have huge -- perhaps even unjustified -- influence.

It’s a village world, where reputation matters, and affiliation is tribal.

There are all the downsides of tribalism, too. There is a “us and them” aspect of bottom-up belonging that needs to be checked with a sense of universalism, a need for universalism. That is why the Web is terrifying to corrupt and controlling nation states: it is inherently non-national, but global and local at the same time. Glocalization is a tribal perspective on the world, that naturally arises from neo-tribal web culture.

The long tail changes economics everywhere, but also changes our conceptions of involvement and value.

When the costs of connectedness drop -- when it becomes possible to remain connected with hundreds not dozens of people, and to remain cognizant of their backgrounds, location, moods, relationships, and positions on matters of importance -- does the world become a deeper place or have our feelings become shallower?

The long tail is not just about availability of obscure books at Amazon. It is about the spectrum of relationships that we can afford, and the depth of our awareness and involvement.

Another tribal trend: more shapes of relationships with more people as more channels for involvement come online, and new ways to discover and experience others become prevalent.

The experience and sense of time says more about a culture in a shorthand way than almost anything else.

Industrial time is falling away in the Western world. The idea that time is a sequence of instants, seconds ticking on a never varying clock, is falling away. We all know that in different hours of the same length our productivity, creativity or efficiency varies wildly; but in many ways we pretend that they are all equal, which is a white lie at the core of much of the value of work.

Time is inconstant, and we sense this mostly as things seeming to speed up. Time dilates or contracts based on what we are doing. And we see the conflict in how we value time; that we are willing to slip from one activity to another, to help a friend to make progress by answering a text message while in a meeting, we are shifting to a time-shifted sense of time. We are adopting continuous partial attention, and reseating our timesense as a result. We are changing our perceptions by the activities and tools we use, just like exposure to flight simulators or martial arts training changes our situational awareness in all aspects of our lives. Learning to juggle is a new state of consciousness that has other benefits/impacts over and above the juggling itself.

One way that people talk about this is moving onto a ‘real-time’ basis. But real-time isn’t any realer than slow time. However, that visceral in the guts sense of increased velocity of the world gets across the potentially disorienting impact of being pushed into a new world that demands new patterns of thinking to understand. Many will feel behind the power curve. But if you look to the youngest among us, you can see that the future is here already, it’s just not equally distributed (Gibson).

We are seeing the next web start to appear today, away from the heavily annotated and mashed web of pages that is the primary reality today. The first glints of that new web is starting to emerge from the lineage of instant messaging and RSS feeds: the development of tools and technologies on top of ubiquitous connectivity that allow the artifacts of conversation between us to flnd us instead of us having to dig through the archives of the web of pages. I call this the web of flow.

We are seeing an explosion in flow applications -- the Facebook minifeed, RSS streams, Friendfeed, Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, and my own Workstreamer project (coming soon) -- where that timeshifting -- not zipping ahead to cut out advertiselments, but a freeing of time, the possibility of time dilation -- will be the norm.

A simple example: the business executive of 2000 would reading every email and then analyze all the information to decide what is important, and what actions to take. But the business executive of 2010 has been pushed to the point where there is no such thing as reading all the email: in fact, there is no hope there. Instead, the future business leader will allow his network to filter and highlight what is critical and important. The crucial things will rise to the top in a darwinian struggle for share of time, or mind, and this will all be managed in a flow model, where s/he spends little or no time filing, opening, or searching. The flow of relationships and information made meaningful through relationships becomes that bloodstream of this brave new world, of society, of the enterprise and the marketplace.

These new realities offer tremendous opportunities and challenges in all sectors, from the mundane questions of business etiquette -- is it ok to instant message during a meeting? In a meeting with a client? -- up to new modes of marketing and connection with markets. The impact of the social web on traditional media has been completely disruptive, and we can contemplate similar impacts on other, less directly implicated industries. But if you connect the dots, inevitably similar revolutionary change is coming.

On the personal and individual level, these trends will lead to a basic identification of ourselves as humans living together on Spaceship Earth, as Buckminster Fuller called it, and a movement away from ideologies that divide us based on language, religion, caste, gender, or ethnic background. As antropologist and ethnographer Claude Levi-Strauss said, in a 1972 interview,
“ A well-ordered humanism does not begin with itself, but puts things back in their place. It puts the world before life, life before man, and the respect of others before love of self. This is the lesson that the people we call "savages" teach us: a lesson of modesty, decency and discretion in the face of a world that preceded our species and that will survive it.

We need to put things back into place, although the configuration that web culture will make of all this is brand new. Much of the sensibility of our time will seem like a return to things that were put aside at the start of the industrial revolution, although much will be completely new. But at the core, Levi-Strauss' checklist -- world, life, people, the respect of others, self -- seems like a pretty good starting point.

credits https://stoweboyd.backpackit.com/pub/1477530

Comments

[yohami]

inspiring. but what´s the price anyway?

[ppearlman]

v nice