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This is a rough, raw draft. It is certain to change, especially since this is the first chapter and is heavily dependent on what gets written in the other chapters. (Unfortunately, the reverse is true also.) |
Started: January 12, 2001
Latest: February 7, 2001
© 2001, David Weinberger
A New World
“I know the
feeling of stepping out onto land that no human in recorded history has stepped
on. It was a feeling very similar to what cyber people are feeling now as they
out into this peculiar virtual world.”
– John Lawrence, Antarctic
explorer[1]
The Web hasn’t been hyped enough.
For all the tanker trucks of ink spilled about the importance of the Web, its real significance hasn’t begun to hit us. We’re still getting bombarded with stories of Internet zillionaires and Internet mergers and Internet perverts. This is like reading a history of the American Revolution that focuses on the catchy tunes that came out of it (“’Yankee Doodle’ totally rocks, dude!”) but misses the fact that a new type of freedom was invented, that the relationship between people and their governments was transformed, and that a theory of inalienable rights was proclaimed on the novel ground of “self-evidence.” These ideas then swept the globe, setting off revolutions and turning subjects into citizens. No small change.
Just as to understand the importance of democracy you have to look past its implementation in the form of voting booths and lobbyists, to assess the importance of the Web you have to look beyond browsers, servers, HTML, XML, security holes, banner ads, electronic shopping carts and all other bits of the technology.[2] Like democracy, the Web is best understood as an idea. And, like democracy, we’ll see that the idea of the Web gets its potency from the fact that it’s a new idea about how people are connected one to the other, individually and in groups. Since we humans are at heart social animals – without a society, only our biology is recognizably human – changes to how we live together are the most important changes of all.
This is reflected in the numbers. Maybe 300 million Web users worldwide. And that’s from 40 million in 1996. More than a few analysts are predicting that there will be a billion people online in 2005.[3] Compared to the growth of cars, or automobiles or telephones that’s incredible. For example, it took television over 70 years to reach half the households in the United States. It took cable TV 39 years. It took newspapers 100 years. It looks as if the Web will reach 50% of all households in about ten years (??) from the introduction of the first broadly available browser (Mosaic) in 1993. [4] That puts the Web in its own league when it comes to technology. Yes, cellular phones have shown an astonishing growth rate also: from 91,000 to 97,000,000 in the US in 15 years. But cell phones are an improvement on an existing technology, not a distinctly new technology. [5] Perhaps the right comparison is to the polio vaccine: developed in 1952, in 1954 1.8 million U.S. kids were inoculated in a mass trial[6], and by ___ n million children had been treated. Or maybe the right comparison is to a somewhat earlier technology with an incredible rate of promulgation: wild fire.
And look at the number of pages: probably around two billion, although, because of the nature of the Web, no one can ever really know how big it is. This uncertainty is a direct result of the structure of the Web. After all, there’s an obvious way to figure out exactly how many pages are in a particular library: you hire a whole mess of graduate students to pull every book from the shelves and count them. In fact, you don’t even have to do that because the library makes sure that every book gets registered in a central card catalog.
The Web isn’t like a library. It’s not even like a messy library, although we sometimes think of it that way. It’s more like the sum total of all the books everyone in the town is buying. And every journal entry, post card, and grocery list. Everyone can put up as many pages as they want. No central committee, no card catalog, no neatly organized shelves. And – perhaps most important – no permission. The incalculability of the Web’s size is a direct result of its structure and nature.
But, it’s not as if we have to wait for inventory to be taken before figuring out that the Web is important. The only question is: How important?
That’s not exactly a hard-edged, scientific question. What will count as an answer? A friend of mine, Paul English, sometimes ask questions such as: “How much do you think it costs to provide basic AIDS treatment in Africa?” At first you sweat, doing wild calculations to try to come up with a number. Then you give your answer. If you say, “$1,000?” Paul responds with an enthusiastic “Awesome!” because the answer is about $300, so you were only off by a factor of three and a third – not bad, considering that you may well have answered $10,000 or $50,000. At least you were within an order of magnitude, i.e., a factor of ten. So, let’s use Paul’s rule of thumb on the question “How important is the Web?” and see if we can come up with something that feels like it’s within an order of magnitude – although, of course, we’ll never be able to really tell.
The importance of a technology is measured by how much it changes the way we live our lives, and this doesn’t always correlate to the cleverness of the technology. For example, the national highway system is a dumb technology. Sure, the engineers had to know about the chemical composition of asphalt and the geology of soon-to-be-ex-hillsides, but the national highway system got built when it did not because of technological breakthroughs but out of a fear that the Russians would invade and we wouldn’t’ be able to move our troops around quickly. (One theory says that we also wanted a nationwide set of emergency landing strips.)
Nevertheless, the national highway system has had a big effect on our patterns of living, making cities more supportable and suburbs possible. Food could be moved around quickly, changing what could be economically farmed in various geographic regions. The highway system is important.
Is the Web as important as the national highway system? I think the answer has to be yes. It’s changing the way businesses work, the way people shop and buy and the way we communicate. That’s the type of thing important technologies do. But Really Important technologies do more than change social structures. They change the way we think about ourselves.
Cars are an example of this. They give rise to the modern American view of freedom as mobility. After the frontier closed, the great idea that you can always pick up and take yourself somewhere new became a myth. Cars made it a reality again. In fact, cars became the way generations of teen-agers have defined who they are. And even after the car becomes, in our middle age, a way of commuting and dragging the kids to the proverbial soccer game, the personal auto still stands for a peculiarly American type of self-identity.
Computers are an even clearer example of a Really Important technology. After listing all the ways that computers enable our modern way of life – from medical miracles to Mario Bros. – you come to the fact that we now understand our own minds in terms of computers. We assume that we “process information” and search through our “memory banks.” In fact, the assumption that consciousness is somehow computer-like is so deeply ingrained that it is going to take generations to remove it.
If computers are Really Important, then certainly the Web is also because the Web is changing something quite fundamental: our understanding of what it means to be connected to one another. Here we have a technology that, like the telephone system, connects everyone to everyone else (given important qualifiers about the uneven reach of phones and the even more uneven reach of computers) but that, unlike the phone, isn’t just person to person. The Web enables people to group themselves, sometimes in new ways, regardless of geography. The Web changes our assumptions about what it means to be part of a whole. Most of our institutions are based upon static connections, established and maintained by a central authority. Marriage, government, religions – these institutions get much of their value from the permanence and stability of the relationships and the hierarchical order they impose. The connections that make up the Web aren’t like that even a little. Web connections are driven and owned by the ends being connected, with no central authority. They are frequently many-to-many connections, frequently transient, frequently messy and discursive, frequently funny.
Relationships, are at the heart of our existence as human beings. Every institution is an institution of relationships. Every aspect of work and of family is about relationships. Language itself is a series of connections. So, if the Web changes the nature of connections, it’s changing something very big.
Even more important, the Web, unlike the phone system, creates a shared world with places – Web sites – that every person can visit and re-visit. It is persistent and public. In fact, it creates a new type of public. That doesn’t happen every day.
The Web isn’t just Really Important, it’s Damn Important.
According to Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash – published in 1992, two or three years before the Web escaped from the scientists that gave it birth – in the not too distant future, people will jack into the “Metaverse,” an alternative universe. To see the Metaverse – “a black sphere with a radius of a bit more than ten thousand kilometers … considerably bigger than Earth”[7] – you have to put on special goggles that fill your visual field with its images and that track your eye movement to show you what you would be seeing if the Metaverse were real:
Hiro [the book’s hero] is approaching the Street. It is
the Broadway, the Champs Elysees of the Metaverse. It is the brilliantly lit
boulevard that can be seen, miniaturized and backward, reflected in the lenses
of his goggles. It does not really exist. But right now, millions of people are
walking up and down it.[8]
The Street is, in some sense, literally a street. It’s got buildings on it, and the buildings have rooms you can enter where you’ll find other visitors to the Metaverse,
Like any place in Reality, the Street is subject to development. Developers can build their own small streets feeding off of the main one. They can build buildings, parks, signs as well as things that do not exist in Reality, such as vast hovering overhead light shows, special neighborhoods where the rules of three-dimensional spacetime are ignore, and free-combat zones where people can go to hunt and kill each other.
…
The sky and the ground are black, like a computer screen that hasn’t had anything draw into it yet; it is always nighttime in the Metaverse, and the Street is always garish and brilliant, like Las Vegas freed from constraints of physics and finance. But people in Hiro’s neighborhood are very good programmers, so it’s tasteful. The houses look like real houses. There are a couple of Frank Lloyd Wright reproductions and some fancy Victoriana.[9]
The Metaverse is so much like the real world that it serves as the setting of Snow Crash’s heroic action as Hiro swashes his buckle through a plot that reads like it came straight from Kevin Costner’s reject pile. The Metaverse is a particularly well-imagined version of a “virtual world” that mirrors the spatiality of the real world. Later books, such as Michael Crichton’s Disclosure paint similar pictures.
Snow Crash is often taken as an early, prescient view of what the Internet was about to become. For example, Stephenson participated in a Internet chat session sponsored by Wired magazine’s Web venture, HotWired, in 1995:
woneill asks: …After reading your Snow Crash book, you seemed to really know the "computer culture". How much exposure to the Internet, etc. had you had at the time?
Not much at the time. At the time I wrote Snow Crash, which was in late 1990/early 91, I had a lot of time under my belt messing around with computers (since the mid-'70's) but not that much net time -- just a bit of messing around on CompuServe and the like…
woneill asks: Okay, since you weren't that familiar with the Net yourself, did you work with/talk with people who were? Feeling out the area, as it were?
Not really. I wouldn't have known whom to talk to about it. The Metaverse was inspired more by thinking about user interfaces than by thinking about Net issues. [10]
How disappointing! Especially these days, it’s almost irresistible to read Snow Crash as a science fiction extrapolation of the Internet. We seem to want to think that that’s where the Net is going.
Indeed, there’s a lot to be said for Snow Crash’s prescience. The Web is a new world. But the Web is much weirder than anything science fiction has coughed up.
* * *
You can find attempts to build a Metaverse-like environment on the Web. Generally they’re hampered by the limitations of bandwidth – downloading the new graphics every time you turn a corner just takes too long to make it worthwhile. Not surprisingly, the attempts that are furthest along are games such as Quake. But games have the luxury of requiring users to install multi-megabyte graphical environments. On the Web, we can’t count on everyone having installed the same CDs, and, worse, we need the environment to be dynamic.
Bandwidth is increasing. When it’s feasible to view movies over the Net, on demand and with the quality of a DVD, then the Net should have the throughput required to let us browse by driving hypercycles along hyperstreets. In fact, it takes much less information to describe a 3D world than to transmit a movie, so we may get to the Metaverse even sooner than that. Even then, however, there’s no reason to believe that that will become the way the Web is experienced. The Metaverse may fizzle or it may turn out to exist alongside the Web instead of replacing it. In fact, it’s entirely likely that inside the Metaverse, our avatars – the visual representations of our selves – will access the Web; imagine Stephenson’s Hiro going up to a kiosk on The Street to browse the Web. But we don’t need to know how the Web will evolve to see that it is already a new world, and, as it exists, it’s a very different type of world.
For many people, using the word “world” gets in the way of understanding just how unusual the Web is precisely because it conjures up images of a graphical virtual environment such as the one described in Snow Crash. And it’s the type of overstatement that triggers the Nah Reflex, as in: “Nah, it’s just a communications medium,” “Nah, it’s just a messy research library,” or “Nah, it’s just a bunch or teenagers and nerds sounding off.”
But I don’t want to back off the term “world.” It is a word we should use carefully so that it has the power it deserves. If the Web is a world, we should expect it to be of considerable importance in our lives. If it’s a new world, then we should expect it to be so different from our usual world (which I’ll call “the real world” throughout this book) that we’ll find ourselves frequently unable to understand it. And if it’s so rare in our history to develop a new, second world, then we should expect this to have effects on how we understand our first world, the real world.
There is nothing abstract about this. How we understand the Web has pervasive effects on how we work, play and do business over the Web. For example, many companies originally did and unfortunately still do think of the Web as a new sales and marketing channel. So, it looks like an information (and marketing propaganda) medium that connects a real world company to a real world customer, as if we’d replaced the airwaves with modems and telephone lines. But if the Web is a world, then the customers who are on it receive the information in this new world and according to the new rules of the new world. Further, because the Web is a world and not simply a medium for commerce, it has much more going on than just selling, shopping and buying. Commerce doesn’t own the Web. Web commerce occurs within a broader Web world in which people are engaged in the full range of social intercourse. And this world by its nature is social, democratizing, random, and suspicious of arrogance and power. The marketing materials that worked so well in the real world work against the interests of the company online not because they are “inefficient” or “need to be tuned” or “have to adopt the Web’s hip new language” but because they are fundamentally out of place. To see how, we need first to understand that the Web is in fact a place, a world.
The Web is a world. What does that mean?
We could get around the question of whether the Web is a world by instead referring to it as a persistent public space. It’s persistent because it lasts beyond our individual interactions with it in a way that telephones call do not. It is public because anyone with a computer and a telephone line can access it. It’s a space because there are places in it.[11] Creating a new persistent public space is no small thing. But thinking of it as a space diminishes the importance of the Web as a new world.
The only way to understand this is to look at the case of a world that, unlike the Web, isn’t ambiguously or merely possibly a world …for example, the real world. What makes the real world a world? If we can make any progress with this question, then we should be able to subtract the elements that make the real world real to see what makes it a world. For example, if we wanted to know if a freshwater body such as Lake Erie should count as an ocean, we would look at a salty ocean we’re sure is an ocean – say, the Atlantic – and then would ignore that it’s salty.
Since the world is the most obvious thing in the world, so to speak, we don’t have to do a lot of research. We can just open the window. There it is. Blue sky. Buildings. Trees. People. (If you need more of a list of what’s in the world, please just open your eyes and look somewhere). Of course, we don’t even have to open the window to see the world. The room, the chairs, the TV set are all part of the world. In fact, no matter how hard we look, we can’t find anything that isn’t.
There’s obviously been thousands of years of thought put into the question “What is the world?” and it’s been the thought of immortal geniuses. Plato thought the world is some type of smudged representation of an eternal set of ideal, perfect forms. Leibniz thought the world is a set of individual, isolated representations of the whole. Spinoza thought that the mental world is representation of a physical world that is essentially apart from it, kept in sync by God’s fine hands. But I want us to think about the world for now with as little regard to theories as we can manage. (In this I am following yet another dead white philosopher, Martin Heidegger.[12])
Look around your world. What do you see? I see a computer, a coffee cup, a bulletin board. I hear a Keith Jarrett CD, although until just now I wasn’t really paying attention to it. I see the walls, but as background. I don’t see the ceiling at the moment (because I’m looking at my computer screen as I type this) but I’m fully confident it’s there. Likewise for the floor. In fact, we might as well say this for the house in which my office sits: I don’t see, hear or smell the house, but when I see the walls, I understand them to be the walls of the house. If I didn’t think my office was in a house, I’d have a different, tacit sense of my office. Likewise, just as I take for granted that my office is in my house, I also take for granted – know but do not pay attention to the fact – that my house is in Brookline, in the United States. In the 21st Century. It’s morning. So, while I may begin by taking inventory of my the things in my world, I silently understand those things as being situated within a larger world.
The situating of things isn’t merely spatial. Take the pen at the side of my keyboard. We’re feeling philosophical this morning, so what is a pen? If you answered that it’s a piece of plastic and metal encasing a fluid that spreads itself in a relatively even layer with closely circumscribed lateral borders, then you need to relax. What you just said is true, but if that’s all you knew about pens, we’d have to say that you don’t really understand what a pen is. What are you missing? That it’s for writing, you moron! I understand it in terms of its use to me and others. But to understand what it means to write, we also need to understand a web of other concepts, such as paper, reading, language, communication, memory, sight and light. Investigate any of the terms in this web and you’re led very quickly to some of the deepest structures of our culture, such as the role of literacy and the differences between written and spoken language. Every object in our environment, even the simplest, is just two degrees away from profundity.
This tells us something important about our world. If we – quite reasonably – start off by trying to understand the world by looking at the things in it, we find we can’t understand them apart from one another and apart from some deep assumptions about how the world works. This means that a pen apart from the world that gives meaning to the pen isn’t a pen. Another culture might have created something physically identical to a pen but, if it uses it instead as a way of moving small amounts of drinkable fluids from place to place, the pen-thing isn’t a pen in that world; it’s more like a canteen.
Our reflex now is to say that if a thing can be a pen in one world and a fluid carrier in another, then it isn’t really a pen or a fluid dispenser – it’s merely what we say it is. I certainly used to think this. In fact, it bothered me so much when I was a freshman and sophomore in college, that I found it was draining my world and thus my life of meaningfulness. I won’t say that I was suicidal, but I certainly was puzzled about what the big fuss was about in life. My first philosophy professor, Joseph Fell at Bucknell University, helped me out of this hole. My despair came from thinking that the pen (for example) isn’t really a pen; it’s merely what we say it is. Suppose, Prof. Fell suggested, that we recognize that “really” and “merely” are evaluative terms. They don’t add a lot to the sentence. Drop them and now I’m saying “A pen is what I say it is.” Let’s test this out. I say it’s a pony. It’s a gold bar. It’s a woman. (Remember, I was 19 at the time.) Gosh, it didn’t work. So, perhaps I’m both wrong and right. I’m right that I am not uninvolved with the meaning of things; if I were from a different culture, the pen might be a canteen. But I’m wrong in thinking that I’m the sole source of meaning. Things get their meaning from a cultural history that works overtly through philosophy, art and science and covertly through the movement of language itself. The meaning of the pen was handed to me. I can’t really change it. And, as we’ve seen, I can only see this as a pen because of a vast, assumed context. That context is the world, and the world is that context.
The world is a referential context – the pieces only make sense by reference to one another. That’s why we talk about “the business world” and “the world of antiques.” By this we in fact mean that there is some complex set of things and ideas that are so interrelated that you more or less have to get the whole before you can get the pieces – try explaining a “pink slip” to someone who doesn’t already understand the idea of hiring, employment, bosses, work, profits, money, etc.
As many beginners have found out, the Internet certainly does have this characteristic of requiring you to understand a lot in order to understand anything at all. But so do the worlds of HO scale model trains, thoroughbred horses and home shopping. I think the Web is a world in a more important sense than that.
There are a few ways to make the case that the Web is an especially important new world. First, unlike smaller worlds, it isn’t held together by a topic of interest. It’s a place where you can pursue whatever interests you have, from HO model trains to thoroughbred horses to business itself.
Second, we can point to the fact that the Web is absorbing more and more of our social interaction. Some of what we used to do by phone, fax and meetings we now do through email. Some relationships that were too hard to keep up in the real world are being revivified by the Web. And we’re forging new types of relationships with people we would otherwise have never met. This is what’s driving the Web, not a mere quest for information or cheap CDs.
Third, there is the strongest claim about the importance of the Web as a world. To get there, let me ask an absurd question: What’s so special about the real world? Among all the possible sub-worlds – model trains, etc. – why is the real world so important? Yes, it’s the largest of all possible worlds, including all the sub-worlds we might encounter. But the difference isn’t merely quantitative. It’s a lived difference. The real world is special because it’s our world. It’s where we live. It’s where we are as people. We are unthinkable apart from this world. Had we been born into a different epoch, say in Roman times, our world and its assumptions would have been so different that it’s hard to see the sense in saying that it’s the same “I” and not just someone who looks like me. And had we somehow been born without a world – no language, no sense of what anything around us is or how it connects – people would be arguing about whether we were conscious at all.
The Web is not as important as the real world. The Web occurs within the real world. There is no Web without a real world. Nevertheless, there’s something about the Web that lets us think that it may be the most important new world that’s opened to us since Adam rubbed his side and handed Eve a fig leaf.
The key is to see that the real world is a social place in two senses. First, we’re deeply aware that it’s a shared world; we live here with others. Second, the real world isn’t an empty, formless playing field in which we encounter others. Rather the way we understand the world – the pen as a pen, for example, or the political equality of all people – comes from a long history of social interactions. The real world is incalculably important because it is a social world in both these senses. But the same can be said of the Web. In fact, the Web is more purely social in both senses. There’s no nature on the Web. Everything there is constructed, and almost all of it is built for others to see. What holds us together on the Web isn’t geography but voluntary engagement with others. The Web is nothing but social. So, of course it’s pulling in more and more of our social lives.
That’s why the Web is more than merely yet-another sub-world. Yes, the Web is global, always accessible, persistent, and open-ended just as the real world is and unlike the sub-worlds of business and model train collectors. But because the defining mark of the Web is that it is a purely social world, it is giving the best part of us – the part that cares beyond itself – a new field of play with the old opportunities for evil and new opportunities for good.
In case you hadn’t noticed, there are important differences between the real world and the Web world. While the rest of this book is devoted to teasing out the differences, we need to look at a few initially.
Here’s one. In the words of Nicholas Negroponte[13], the real world is made of atoms, while the Web is made of bits. Of course, ultimately these bits are stored, conveyed and displayed via atoms, but ultimately the “stuff” or “matter” of the Web are bits representing information.
But who cares? So you can’t stub your toe on the Web. What real difference does it make?
It does matter because of two defining facts about atoms. First, they have to be in one place or another. (We’re skipping quantum mechanics here.) That means that space gets organized in ways that make some atoms further away than others. Second, atoms existed before us and exist independent of us. In fact, atoms just don’t give a damn about us. So we find ourselves on a planet with deserts where it’d be better if there were lakes and with mountains where a nice fertile plain would be nice.
The Web is free of both of these limitations. First, it has no space and no distance. We so take both of these for granted in the real world that when we get on the Web we can easily find ourselves disoriented. For example, we think a “big” Web site will be more visible than a little one the way big stores are easier to spot than small ones. But that’s only true if there’s a landscape over which you can tower.
Second, and, perhaps most important, we’re born into atoms, but we make the Web. In Heidegger’s words, I find myself thrown into the real world. I can’t give it a different history. I can’t even choose different parents. Participating in the real world is not a voluntary activity. But the Web is. We choose to go there. Everything there has been placed there for us to see. It is created by and for humans. On the Web, to be is to be seen.
But not just seen. More specifically, to be is to be read. While there’s more to the Web than text, and while we will certainly see a rapid growth of graphical media delivered over the Web, the Web started as a way to link primarily textual research reports and to this day Web pages are as text-based as most magazine pages.
If the Web is a read medium, how can it also be a world? We don’t have to resort to theories of perception and reading to know for a certainty that there is such a thing as a read world. We enter one every time we’re engrossed in a work of fiction. We know that we can be so involved in the snowy world of 19th Century Russia, for example, that when the telephone rings, it feels like an intrusion. Fiction creates worlds.
In fact, the worlds of fiction share other characteristics with the world of the Web. They are persistent. We can enter them whenever and wherever we want (so long as we’ve brought along a copy of the book). They are simultaneous with the real world. They are created by humans for humans. They overcome distance – two events or two places can be brought next to each other at the whim of the author, as, for example, when Melville takes us on a digression to ancient Egypt in the middle of narrating life at sea aboard the Pequod in Moby Dick. Finally, entering these new worlds is voluntary; we are there because we’re interested. In fact, the Web is more like the novel Snow Crash than like the Metaverse that the novel describes.
Of course, there are differences. The Web isn’t created by a single author. Reading is a solitary act, whereas being on the Web brings you into contact – direct or otherwise – with millions of other people. And, the Web changes every millisecond, whereas Moby Dick remains the same story about the same whale and crew every time you read it. Most important, we enter fictional worlds as observers. Try as we might, we can’t stop Jo [Is she the one who dies??] from dying in Little Women. Nor can we make her die faster or play a nude scene. The Web, on the other hand, is a world we enter as participants. The landscape has been written for us (and by us), and now we’re free to move about, meeting others. This remains, however, fundamentally a written world: we navigate by clicking on words or typing in URLs and our encounters with others are mediated by a keyboard.
So Negroponte’s characterization of the real world as atoms and the Web world as bits is reductionist and misleading. The real world isn’t just atoms; it consists of things. The Web world isn’t just bits. It’s not even just information. Predominantly, it’s words. But even that’s reductionist, for we know that from words we can build worlds. We have done it over and over with fiction, starting with stories told around the fire. We have done it again – in a different but related way – with the Web. And from the fact that the world of the Web is built of words comes the Web’s essential character as a social place for humans and by humans, with the comprehending power of fiction and the passion of personal interaction.
The new world that is the Web is weird. It has no space, no distance, no atoms. It’s a world built by humans for humans. By writing. It’s a world we enter voluntarily rather than finding ourselves thrown into it. There is nothing there by accident. Everything has some human meaning.
And yet, it’s quite familiar. That’s why hundreds of millions of people have succeeded at it without any training beyond “If it’s blue and underlined, click on it.” [This line is from the Cluetrain Manifesto, I think.] It uses conventions of magazines, of books, of letters, of notes passed back and forth in school. Because it’s created by people for other people, it tends to be intelligible whereas we’ve been puzzling over the brute silence of the real world for millennia.
It’s the familiarity of this weird world that most often leads us astray. The Web seems so straightforward, so like other things in our real world experience, that we make assumptions that are appropriate to the real world but wildly wrong on the Web. Usually we learn quickly – emails aren’t as long as letters and require faster turnaround than letters, online stores don’t have helpful salespeople patrolling the aisles … if there were aisles in the first place – but where the differences are deep and subtle, we get lost rather easily. That’s why we have seemingly endless arguments over “intellectual property” and the role of anonymity, and how far privacy should extend on the Web. These are complex topics that are embedded in highly referential contexts off the Web. To understand any one of them, you have to understand a broad set of other terms that stand in relation to them, just as to understand the concept of a loan you have to understand money, banks, interest, investments and how money makes money. We come across them in a Web setting and don’t always recognize how much the context in which they’re embedded has changed.
This problem arises inevitably, for we understand the unfamiliar by reference to the familiar. But we can begin to get past it by looking underneath the dispute to the contextual terms it’s assuming. To take an obvious example, there has been a lot of discussion, in many media, about whether the Net is making us less social because we’re spending more time alone in front of computer monitors. There are some factual issues that can be adduced – for example, apparently Web users are generally watching less television than they did before they went online – but the debate isn’t merely factual. We instead need to wonder about what we mean by “social” and even by “alone.” Real world social groups constitute themselves by drawing boundaries via membership and meetings. To join a discussion group off the Web, I’ll have to ask the group’s permission and if it conflicts with my cat’s yoga classes, I won’t be able to join. To join a discussion group on the Web, I just have to point my browser at it. I can participate when I want. I can be a member simply by reading. And the online group is likely to have more members who are unannounced and thus unknown than those who are actively participating. Even with all the factual research in the world, we’re not going to be able to answer the question about whether the Web is making us more social without rethinking “social” and the other words in its contextual web of meaning, such as “group,” “member” and “participate.”
Here’s another example. Our daughter, 15, does her written homework on a computer. While she’s doing it, she usually has five or six America On Line “instant messaging” windows open, chatting with her friends. Some of the conversations are about purely social topics, but frequently one or two will be about the homework that she’s doing. Our daughter and her friends check their answers, talk about how they’re approaching an essay question, and engage in just the same sort of talk you’d overhear in a high school cafeteria. I have not talked about this with her teachers for fear that they will think that my daughter is cheating. My daughter would be shocked to hear this. For her, doing your homework while chatting with your friends about homework and the rest of life is how you do homework. It’s also how you learn. Networked learning is the norm in a networked world, just as solitary learning is the norm in an academic system that envisions scholars as monks engaged in holy communion with The Word. Now, it’s easy to determine if this way of working is cheating, for the teacher sets the rules. The more important questions are much harder to answer: Is it learning? In a networked world, what constitutes being smart: having information internalized or being able to find the links to the answers? Is there such a thing as group intelligence? Nor can these questions be addressed in isolation, for the notion that intelligence means having lots of ideas stuffed into your head is reflected in how we teach and, horrifyingly, in how we test. It impinges upon what we mean by qualifications and certification. It influences the very nature and rhythm of conversation as people (typically men) try to prove they are the smartest people in the room.
To answer these questions perhaps all we have to do is look at the context. If only it were that simple. The context in which things have meaning is not only referential, it’s tacit and taciturn. It’s the background that makes the foreground stand out, but as a background, it can’t be seen as a background because as we look at it, it becomes the foreground.
It’s not an impossible task, only a difficult one. It is impossible to look at the world completely free of any context. If we were to do that, we wouldn’t be able to understand what we see because things make sense only in context. Our ways of seeing are thoroughly conditioned by our history and language. We’re stuck with them, like it or not. We can, however, look more carefully at the context while staying within the context. In fact, we do this frequently in conversation – we point out what is silently affecting our views: “That’s assuming that rap music is a type of autobiography and not a type of fiction,” or “I thought the fight sequences were intended as an homage to old Westerns” or “Whoa, you have to distinguish between a biological parent and a care-giving parent!”
The context of our lives is expressed in what we call “common sense.” Frequently, common sense is the last resort of the thoughtless, invoked to stop a conversation from proceeding. But common sense is broader than that. It consists of the assumptions that guide our action and even our perception without our usually being explicitly aware of it. Common sense is the set of values and rules that are so obvious that we don't even think about them. For example, if your rocking chair has caught a dog's tail under the runner, you lean forward to free the tail. If someone wants to argue about whether you should bother to lean forward – seriously argue – we will think, quite properly, that this person is significantly out of step with our culture. In short, he's a whack job. Likewise, if someone tries to cut in line for no good reason, or tells us the same joke three times in a row at lunch, we'll worry about which universe of discourse they're visiting us from.
Common sense is a gift of history, religion, philosophy, literature and more. For example, in the United States, if you take your boat out onto the sea despite a storm warning, we'll send the Coast Guard after you, putting other people's lives at risk. In ancient Greece, you'd be left to your own foolish devices. These two different common senses reflect deep understandings of what it is to be human in an inhuman world. Common sense is a rich gift.
Now, take our current world and remove space and matter, and thus many of the laws of physics. Change the rules of the world and what was once common sense now makes no sense. That's why the Web is so puzzling so often. It's lacking common sense.
It will take a generation to develop this new common sense, but we're already beginning to see signs of it. Elements include:
Content ought to be free. Forty million people signing up for Napster have rapidly moved this precept towards a new common sense, albeit one that flies in the face of our real world common sense and its business models. Does this mean that all content will be free on the Web? Of course not. But the old presumption against owning content without paying for it has been deeply eroded.
Strangers are fun. In the real world, the sound of footsteps behind us on a dark street sets our pulse racing in fear. On the Web, the sound of footsteps sets our pulse racing in anticipation. The Web's value comes from strangers.
We are fallible. In the real world we strive to maintain a consistent, flawless public face. On the Web, there's no time for that. Be fallible and move on.
Be generous with advice. In the real world, we may once in a while help a lost visitor orient himself. But on the Web, the new common sense says that we should share our expertise as well as our music tracks.
Be direct. We've all been trained in the art of polite indirection. We wrap our thoughts in the cotton batting of qualifiers. The Web favors directness both because directness is faster and because the differences around conversational indirection are so culturally relative.
Real genius requires a group. Our real world common sense says that committees are dumber than individuals and that unmanaged groups are mobs. The Web common sense says that “mob” product development – also known as the Open Source Movement – not only works but can result in works of genius.
Humorlessness is pathological. Humor is a way of forging context quickly. What you find funny tells me a huge amount about you. And, more important, a lack of humor betokens a self-seriousness that will break the back of the Web.
Digressions are essential. The aim of a journey traditionally has been to get from A to B and anything that diverts you from that destination is an obstruction. Worse, diverting oneself is an act of moral depravity. But not on the Web where all the fun and most of the growth in knowledge and understanding comes from wandering into patches you didn't know were there.
The exact details of the new common sense developing on the Web won't be known for decades. In fact, it will take a new generation to grow into this common sense. Until then, we can only do our best to investigate and speculate.
On the other hand, we are at a unique point in the development of this new common sense, a place at which we can stop and watch what’s beginning to unfold, before it becomes the taken-for-granted way we see the world, before it becomes invisible. That’s what we hope to do in this book.
In a classic Monty Python sketch, John Cleese plays Anne Elk, a prim woman who can barely contain her excitement about her new theory of the brontosaurus; Graham Chapman is the standard-issue BBC interviewer. Miss Elk has been clearing her throat and repeating that the theory is hers and she is the author of the theory. Towards the end of the sketch, we have the following exchange:
Miss Elk: … Well Chris, what is it that it is - this theory of mine. Well, this is what it is - my theory that I have, that is to say, which is mine, is mine
Presenter: (Beginning to show signs of exasperation) Yes, I know it's yours, what is it?
Miss Elk: Where? Oh, what is my theory? This is it. (Clears throat at some length) My theory that belongs to me is as follows. (Clears throat at great length) This is how it goes. The next thing I’m going to say is my theory. Ready?
Presenter: Yes!
Miss Elk: My theory by A. Elk. Brackets Miss, brackets. This theory goes as follows and begins now. All brontosauruses are thin at one end, much thicker in the middle and then thin again at the far end. That is my theory, it is mine, and belongs to me and I own it, and what it is too.
Presenter: That's it, is it?
Miss Elk: Stop on, Chris.
Presenter: Well, er, this theory of yours appears to have hit the nail on the head.
Miss Elk: And it's mine.[14]
Pardon me while I don my Anne Elk mask and expound my unified theory of the Web. Ahem. By me. Ahem. Ahem. Here goes:
The Web consists
of many small pieces loosely joined.
Ahem.
In fact, almost everything interesting, distinctive and difficult about the Web goes back to these five words: many small pieces loosely joined. Think about the systems and institutions that have advanced our culture. Education. Government. Business. Religion. The same basic picture emerges: The bigger a system is, the more control it requires. Or, to be more accurate, the more complex a system is, the more control it requires. Since complexity is a function of size, the complexity curve is steeper than the size line. So, while it may take only one adult and a sketch on the back of an envelope to build a tree house, by the time you get to a project such as the Hoover Dam, you have not only hundreds of managers, but managers managing the managers, and then you bring in management consulting firms to help manage the way the managers are managing the managers.
Management is good. It brings efficiency and accountability. But we also know that there are other, less honorable reasons we like building big management structures. The larger the fiefdom, the more powerful the monarch. If your project gets big enough, you can actually become a pharaoh and have your brains hooked out through your nose when you die. Management is, in short, about power as much as about efficiency. As Edward Tufte has said, “Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.”[15]
Management hierarchies are thus over-determined (Freud’s term for a symptom that has more than one sufficient cause): efficiency, accountability, and personal power. As a result, we have been conditioned to associate complexity with management.
How does a large, managed project work? Systems get big by adding pieces in a highly organized and controlled fashion. Before a piece can be inserted – whether it’s a new law, a new curriculum, or a book in the library – someone in charge has to say Yes and its place in the structure has to be carefully decided. That’s the practice that’s built our civilization.
Now consider how we would have gone about building the Web if we’d deliberately set out to. This is the largest, most complex network ever built. By far. It’s an engineering project that surpasses the imagination. It is by orders of magnitude the largest assemblage of human creativity in history. Because complexity requires management, we would have planned it, budgeted it, managed it … and we would have failed miserably. If everything had to be coordinated and controlled, we’d still be processing Requests to Join and Requests to Post. After all, there are well over a billion pages on the Web already. There is no conceivable amount of human effort that could have managed those pages into existence. It would have required a mobilization on the scale of a world war. And if we’d tried to build the Web the way we build everything else, we’d have editors poring through those pages, authenticating them, vetting them for scandalous and pornographic material, classifying them, and getting sign-offs and permissions to avoid the inevitable law suits. Why, the Web might have well over 10,000 pages by now! . Yet we – all of us – have built the global Web without a single person with a business card that says “Manager, WWW.”
The Web’s very existence is a slap in the face to our instincts about how to build complex systems. Our biggest joint undertaking as a species is working out splendidly but only because we forgot to apply the theory that’s guided us for, say, 2,500 years. And we all know it. Whether we’ve thought about it explicitly or not, we all tacitly recognize – it’s part of the Web’s common sense – that what’s on the Web was put there without permission. We know we can go wherever we want on the Web without permission. We know we can say what we want in an email or on a discussion board without permission. The sense of freedom on the Web is palpable. The Web is profoundly permission-free and management-free and we all know it.
The result is a Web that isn’t well-coordinated. Not hardly. That’s why we have search engines and it’s why search engines are such a pain in the neck. The Web is a mess. Because there’s no central control, it’s organized exactly the way each of the hundreds of millions of people who built it organized their bit of it. It is self-organizing, but even that is giving it too much credit. About 35 years ago, Robert Venturi wrote groundbreaking architectural works – Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and Learning from Las Vegas[16] – that found value and even beauty in, for example, the city of Las Vegas because it was a perfect, and in a way, natural expression of the summation of forces that built it. But even Las Vegas is well-organized compared to the Web for, Las Vegas benefits not only from the silent organizing principle of geography, but also from there being a leitmotif of its structures: they are built to take money from visitors. The Web encompasses a far wider set of human interests and motivations. Name a reason a person might want to communicate with another; that’s a reason a person might do something on the Web.
So, if we say that the Web is self-organizing, it’s crucial to recognize that that doesn’t imply that it’s very organized at all. It is not, for example, as consistent, predictable or purposeful as a protozoan. To say the Web is organic is to under-appreciate organisms. It does tend to regulate itself if you count as self-regulation the abandoning of a discussion that went so well that too many people joined it or the introduction of filters to try to give us back a grip on email gone out of control. The Web’s organization is only and precisely what individuals on the Web want it to be. It reflects shifting interests and preferences. It is organized only to accomplish some person’s or group of people’s needs at the moment. This results in some organizational structures that are quite long-lasting, such as the Web site that a big company has sunk millions of dollars into, but many more structures that last as long as two cars playing tag on a highway – a quick exchange of emails, a mailing to 5 friends, a joke that sweeps around the world in 8 hours and is forgotten, a link on a page that no one notices and that breaks two days later.
And yet the thing works. The Web exists and invites us in. We get work done on it, and we make friends through it. We learn, we laugh, we get fooled. It grows. New ideas flourish or crack under the weight of their own cleverness. We listen to music, we get seduced by rumors, we discover sex acts we hadn’t known existed. Our children are challenged, enlarged, ennobled and corrupted. It’s less organized than an avalanche and about as elegant. But the Web works. Beyond any reasonable expectation, the Web works.
While it’s lack of organization is epic, the Web does have a discernible character. As gravity, mass and energy are the fundaments of physics, almost all of that character and nature of the Web itself can be traced back to the fact that the Web consists of many small pieces loosely joined.
The first law of the Web is that the pieces join themselves. It is a place of self-organization. It is thus radically decentralized.
Because they join themselves, the relationships that are formed are voluntary and thus based on human interests. We create hyperlinks to other sites that interest us, we join discussion groups that grab our attention, we send email to people who talk about the things we care about.
The bonds that constitute the Web are social. It is a profoundly social space. Every page that’s built, every service that’s provided was brought into existence for other people. It may be there to serve, to amuse, to edify, to delight, to frustrate, to annoy, to impugn, to hurt, but it is there for others.
Thus the Web is not just a social place but also a public place, as public as a beach or a mountaintop or a dance hall. Of course there are sites that refuse admittance to some or many, but these are public in their own limited way, like a private club. On the Web there are only various ways of being public.
This public world is entirely artificial. There is nothing natural there except human imagination. Everything in this world is there on purpose. There is no randomness on the Web. Nothing is there by accident. Every mysterious object has an explanation, although we may never find it out.
Everything expresses human will. All the explanations have to do with human intentionality. It is therefore a psychological world, a venal world, a moral world, a spiritual world.
Because it is entirely a created world, we can change the creation. We can alter it from second to second, we can make it look one way for one person and another for someone else. The law of identity does not hold: the same place can be different for different people at the same time.
Not only can the pieces themselves vary from person to person, but their arrangement can also. The web of links that constitute the webbiness of the Web can be different for each of us.
Web objects - pages - always get some of their value from the links that are on them or point to them. In fact, the most visited Web pages are directories such as Yahoo! that get almost all their value from the fact that they point away from themselves. Web objects cannot be understood in themselves. They are not containers of value; they get their value from pointing outside of themselves.
The Web world is safe in important ways, and dangerous in others. It is safe physically; the worst that can happen is that you’ll get carpal tunnel syndrome or a really bad headache from staring into a fuzzy monitor. And those dangers occur within the real world, not the Web world. But you can lose real world money, reputation, and time on the Web. Since it is purely a social world, the risks are social, too.
Finally in this new physics, it’s central to the Web world that it is connected to the real world. Without the real world, there would be no Web. But this dependency can be misleading. Our interactions in the real world increasingly rely on the Web. Indeed, more and more of our social life is moving from atoms to bits.
Ahem.
In 1999, Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and I created the website www.cluetrain.com. When an unexpected offer to write a book came in, we took it. The Cluetrain Manifesto did surprisingly well, reaching #4 on the Businessweek bestseller list and hanging around on The New York Times bestseller list for a few months. Personally, I was shocked and not only because I use personal pessimism as a way to avoid unpleasant surprises. The Cluetrain Manifesto – the site and the book – attempted to speak for the Web and its most fervent denizens, ranting at the way all too many businesses and journalists think about the Web. The Web is not primarily a business opportunity of some sort. No, the Web is transforming the way businesses work and the way markets form, returning voices to individuals and enabling worldwide, chaotic, anarchic and vastly entertaining conversations to occur. While the Manifesto was aimed at business people, its message was that the Web isn’t fundamentally about business. The world’s population isn’t signing up in droves because we’re looking for a better shopping experience. The Web promises something more. Its appeal ultimately is to the human spirit.
I believe that more than ever, even though I’ve been down in the dirt of the Web for many years now: I’ve started dot-coms and I’ve taken them public. I love technology for its own sake. I waste too much time playing dumb-but-beautiful shoot-‘em-up games over the Net. (Quake rules!) I talk about business, the Web and technology with smart people in companies large and small every day. I am online all day every day. I hand-code a Web ‘zine. I spend many hours every day writing and reading email. All this taken in one pathetically webby bundle still doesn’t get at why I think the Web is important.
Business, technology, games, publishing, email…the Web doesn’t reduce to any one of these or to the complete set of them. That’s why I propose here to look at it as an idea in the context of other ideas. The intellectual context of a small idea generally consists of other small ideas. But to understand the Web, we are forced to look at some of the largest, most basic ideas in our culture. And that is how this book proceeds.
Here’s the plan:
Chapter 1 (this chapter) is about the world. The Web isn’t a medium or primarily a channel for commerce. It’s a new world. Literally. But it’s so unlike our normal world that we don’t yet have a common sense for understanding it.
Chapter 2 is about space. It’s crucial to the Web as a world that we can move around in it. Thus, the Web feels spatial to us. But it is a very weird type of space, one without distance. It’s a space made of hyperlinks, and thus it’s constructed of meaning and human interest, devoid of the randomness and cruelty of real world geography. The Web consists of places not in space.
Chapter 3 is about reality. We call this the “real world.” Why? Does that mean that the Web is an unreal world? And the Web is a world that is read, a very odd notion until we consider that that is precisely what a work of fiction is. Indeed, the Web consists of things that combine documents and buildings – pages we “go to.” The Web has all of the qualities of reality except matter and, unlike the real world, is a profoundly human place. (By the way, we can’t make sense of reality without talking about time.)
Chapter 4 is about the public. The Web is a persistent public place. But, because it’s a purely social invention, it’s a very different type of public than the real world one. In fact, the Web resolves – or rewires – the “paradox of the public,” namely that as members of the public we are (oxymoronically) faceless individuals.
Chapter 5 is about the self. If the Web is a
new type of public, then we must be a new type of self in that public, a self
that itself consists of many small pieces loosely joined.
Chapter 6 is about commerce. On the Web, business is public and exposed. What is it like to do business in the full light of day? Can the structure of business survive the glare?
Chapter 7 is about morality. How are the rules changing for engaging with one another as individuals in this new public world?
Chapter 8 is about spirit. Should we be optimistic or pessimistic about this new world? Ultimately this is a question that calls on us to make some personal decisions.
Let’s begin…
[1] Quoted in Virtual Teams, Jessica Lipnack & Jeffrey Stamps, Wiley (NY: 1997). P. 237-8.
[2] Throughout this book I shamelessly confuse the Internet with the Web. For example, I talk about email as a Web phenomenon when it obviously is an Internet technology. I do this not out of ignorance but because I believe that the networked capabilities provided by the Internet and the Web present themselves to users as a whole. To the user, there is only the new networked world. The distinction between the Net and the Web is important only at the level of technology, not at the level of ideas. So, no need to write me the flaming email about what a moron I am on this point. Save it for more important points.
[3] http://www.wmsociety.org/bacheca/messages/121.html
[4] John Carey. “The First 100 Feet for Households: Consumer Adoption Patterns” http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/iip/doeconf/carey.html
[5] Johanna Seltz, “What Is It They’re Really Saying about Cell Phones,” Boston Sunday Globe, Focus Section, p. 1, Jan. 21, 2001.
[6] Pat Zacharias, “Conquering the dreaded crippler, polio” The Detroit News, http://detnews.com/history/polio/polio.htm
[7] Stephenson, p. 23.
[8] Neal Stephenson. Snow Crash. (Bantam, 1992) p.23
[9] Stephenson, pp. 23-4.
[10] http://hotwired.lycos.com/talk/club/special/transcripts/95-01-19.stephenson.html. Indeed, in the book, Stephenson introduces the buildings of the Metaverse as the “user interfaces” of the companies that built them (pp. 23-4).
[11] Frequently in this book I have to choose between anticipating ideas that will be developed later or putting matters in a way that I know – because I’ve already read the book – will turn out to be not quite right. For example, in the next chapter, we’ll re-think the sense in which the world is a space. I’m usually going to choose to the second course to avoid the sort of interruptions epitomized by this footnote.
[12] Martin Heidegger’s thought shows up in many places in this book. Many years ago I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Heidegger because I thought he was fundamentally right on some key issues, in particular his attempt to describe consciousness (or, more exactly, what it is to be human) by looking first at our everyday experience, rather than starting from some historically-derived problem such as “How does mental stuff ever know about physical stuff?” However, in the past decade or so, research into Heidegger’s life has convinced me that his “flirtation” with Nazism in the 1930s – he was a member of the Nazi party for under two years, supposedly as a condition for his taking over the rectorship of a university – was indicative of a more deeply held set of Nazi beliefs. I have been convinced that some elements of his belief that had seemed innocuous if mysterious to me and others – for example, his insistence on “resoluteness” as a key element of authenticity – are consonant with racist and anti-Semitic beliefs. This leaves me, a Jew, shaped by what I think are the deepest elements of his thought – including his basic insight into what constitutes a world – while despising their author.
For a summary of the brief against Heidegger, see http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/apr2000/heid-a03.shtml. For a more sympathetic view, see: http://commhum.mccneb.edu/PHILOS/stealing2.htm
[13] Nicholas Negroponte. Being Digital. (Knopf: NYC) 1996.
[14] Transcript found at http://www.ironworks.com/comedy/python/elk.htm. The content is undoubtedly copyrighted by Monty Python, their holding company or someone who ripped them off. The Monty Python home page seems to be: http://www.pythonline.com
[15] Reported by Marina Streznewski in an email to the author, January 2001. She heard Tufte say this in a presentation. (Edward Tufte is the author of the classic book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information).
[16] Robert Venturi, (Vincent, Jr. Scully, Illustrator) Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (Museum of Modern Art: NYC) 1966. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, (MIT Press: Cambridge) 1972.