I was one of those darn fools who got an English literature degree. Before that, I was into programming; after that, I was into music. What does each teach?
- Music teaches you to think in abstractions and isomorphic structures;
- Programming teaches you to think of small objects interacting to produce results that don’t look like they come from such small objects.
- Literature, on the other hand, teaches you to view all of reality as metaphor.
When I approach the field I call “information science,” or the study of how things are organized in a practical (non-academic) sense, I like to use the term “information ecosystem.” This means the interaction between small objects to produce a result that is, like music, an isomorphic pattern that appears in different fields and objects. The patterns in which information is organized are the metaphors, and so you see them in many places even though they exist in none.
Kind of neat, isn’t it.
Johnson goes on to draw an analogy between these human waste-recyclers and their microscopic counterparts, bacteria. “Without the bacteria-driven processes of decomposition, the Earth would have been overrun by offal and carcasses eons ago,” he reminds us. “If the bacteria disappeared overnight, all life on the planet would be extinguished within a matter of years.”
Bloggers do similarly useful work. In fact, the blogosphere may best be thought of as a vast digestive tract, breaking down the news of the day into ever finer particles of meaning (and ever more concentrated toxins).
It’s worth remembering that, in a literary context, another word for “parasitic” is “critical”. Blogging is, at its essence, a critical form, a means of recycling other writings to ensure that every molecule of sense, whether real or imagined, is distilled and consumed. ^
At the bottom of the information ecosystem are people who read stuff.
Obliquely above are people like me: we sip from the firehose of news and post the stuff we think is neat, and comment on it.
People then move that around off-line by mentioning it in conversation.
Eventually, someone higher-up may find one of these ideas interesting from me or another small producer, and cite or plagiarize them.
The technical term for the blogosphere as defined above is saprophyte, or a creature that survives by digesting and decomposing material.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the new media revolution; it got taken over by old media. While the Internet is home to a staggering diversity of voices, most people still get their online news from established, old-media players. The Project for Excellence in Journalism has just released a report on the state of the news media in 2008, and it finds that top online news destinations command an even greater percentage of readers than than do the top offline news destinations. ^
Every ecosystem has some features that draw everyone together so they can meet and compete. Maybe it’s the watering hole, or fresh fruit when in season, or a flash fire that sends little tasty creatures skittering out of their hiding places. Big media owns the web. Otherwise, there’s too much information to parse, and no focal points, like areas where different species mingle, for any kind of interaction to happen. So people turn to the newspapers, magazines, TV stations, and big media companies they’ve always read, but this information trickles down: first it goes to the big news services, then the big blogs, then little guys like me blog it and mail that information to our friends and family. Like the forest, the internet acts like a filter for the big providers.
But even as the corporate world has begun to embrace the idea of the bazaar as a forum for innovation, software programmers have continued to debate the strengths and weaknesses of peer production.
The open source model has proven to be an extraordinarily powerful way to refine programs that already exist — Linux, for instance, is an elaboration of the venerable Unix operating system, and the open source Firefox browser builds on Netscape’s old Navigator — but it has proven less successful at creating exciting new programs from scratch.
That fact has led some to conclude that peer production is best viewed as a means for refining the old rather than inventing the new; that it’s an optimization model more than an invention model. ^
Further up on the food chain, there’s people who produce software. They aren’t quite to where commercial producers are, but they serve an important role.
Open source is free because the labor is free and someone else already designed a commercial version of the program, so the open source team gets a big boost in product design — free money from corporations, in other terms, even though no money changes hands.
As a result, like an oasis, open source attracts both people who live in parched places (low money) and those who are adventurers and have strayed past the boundaries with which they’re familiar, and are now out of water.
This part of the ecosystem allows ideas to cycle from the corporate sphere back down through the end-users (parched) and power users (adventurers), helping the software evolve.
The technology industry thrives on its ability to sell new products to consumers at an ever-increasing pace, and it has turned many upgrades into painless, one-click operations. But millions of users of nearly every type of Internet service and technology, from Netscape and AOL dial-up to old e-mail systems, still prefer to ignore the pitches and sit still — or at least move ahead at their own pace. ^
This is your end user here. They want their technology to just work for five or seven years, because they use it for limited tasks. In fact, 90% of them do the same things: light web surfing, light email, occasional video and audioconferencing, Microsoft Office-style apps, and maybe running one of a handful of custom apps (recipe organizer, stitchery layout, tshirt overlay designer, genealogy programs).
The end users are numerous and so provide impetus for others to develop better versions of the software or operating systems they use. However, the end user won’t take on these new products — the power users will, and only then will the parched end-users explore them.
Simply put, top executives at most companies fail to recognize the value of IT. It can help a company transform data from its operations, its business partners and its markets into useful competitive information. It can be the source of profitable innovations in the way a company interacts with its customers and suppliers. But there is still a tendency to think of IT as a basic utility, like plumbing or telephone service. ^
That’s because it is a basic utility at this point. Users want to make computers do things that are not related to computers, like create spreadsheets or charts or reports; programmers want to make computers do computer things; management wants to make the two work together to get a cash-producing product out there. Together they form one part of this ecosystem.
According to Levy’s introduction, “the best tech writing is still found where you’d most expect it: top-notch publications that seek out the best writers.” This means that blogging, which tends to focus more on daily commentary and criticism than on deep-dive reporting and traditional features, tends to produce less material that’s interesting to read a year later. ^
There are other special relationships. Tech writers (writers in mainstream publications who talk about technology, as opposed to “technical writers,” who write manuals) are the people who go out and find the big ideas and then bring them back to others; they’re like lions who make a kill, eat their fill, and then leave the carcass for others to pick over and finally decompose, leaving a fresh bed of loam for next season.
The history of online social networking would make for an interesting book. It’s all the rage nowadays as if it were something new, but in fact social networking was already in play everywhere in the early 1980s, when the Web was dominated by the Source, CompuServe, and various homebrew BBS systems. ^
It’s true: humans have always molded technology into the same form, because it’s shaped around the same ecosystem — the human social network that uses technology to achieve its daily tasks.
And here’s an example of one part of the ecosystem that is running through its long life cycle, and possibly facing changes:
I adored the Wikipedia when it was first launched and I contributed to a number of articles, some extensively, and always anonymously. The Wikipedia then was a riot of contributors, each adding bits and pieces to the articles they were familiar with, with nary an admin or editor in sight.
It worked and grew because it tapped into the heretofore unmarshaled energies of the uncredentialed. The thesis procrastinators, the history buffs, the passionate fans of the alternate universes of Garth Nix, Robotech, Half-Life, P.G. Wodehouse, Battlestar Galactica, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charles Dickens, or Ultraman—all those people who hoped that their years of collecting comics or reading novels or staring at TV screens hadn’t been a waste of time—would pour the fruits of their brains into Wikipedia, because Wikipedia added up to something. This wasn’t like writing reviews on Amazon, where you were just one of a million people urging a tiny opinion and a Listmania list onto the world—this was an effort to build something that made sense apart from one’s own opinion, something that helped the whole human cause roll forward.
Wikipedia was the point of convergence for the self-taught and the expensively educated. The cranks had to consort with the mainstreamers and hash it all out—and nobody knew who really knew what he or she was talking about, because everyone’s identity was hidden behind a jokey username. All everyone knew was that the end product had to make legible sense and sound encyclopedic. It had to be a little flat—a little generic—fair-minded—compressed—unpromotional—neutral. The need for the outcome of all edits to fit together as readable, unemotional sentences muted—to some extent—natural antagonisms. ^
If you cross levels of the ecosystem, you get a temporary boost, but then struggle because you are out of context. If there is drought, prairie dwellers may go to the forest, and mice may hunt bugs, but those are unsustainable. The biggest problem on the internet is understanding its ecosystem, and recognizing which parts feed which audience. If you misread, you go through a short life cycle because your model is unsustainable.
Right now, in our information ecosystems, there is barely any knowledge of the different parts and how they interact. We view users as generic customers or receivers of free software. We need to start looking into users not as a solid group, but as a hierarchy of people with different needs and interests, and by finding their part of the ecosystem, pitch them the products they need instead of generic solutions.
[...] going to need a new culture based on the information ecosystem that gives us rights and expectations and customs based around keeping our data, both public and [...]