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Spirit Of The Web
Lots of people are unhappy about the information explosion. Academics and social critics argue that modern communications technologies are triggering a deluge of junk data we don't need, that overwhelms most people, and makes intelligent discourse nearly impossible.
Canadian science and technology writer Wade Rowland has more balanced overview. Information technologies like the Net, he argues, have enormous promise. But, he writes, "it is important...to recognize that it is as true when dealing with the opportunities offered by technology as it is with political institutions, that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." Technological processes are amenable to management, he says, but in the absence of continuous monitoring and intervention at appropriate decision points, they will manage themselves in ways that might might not be to our collective advantage.
The Net, in particular, warns Rowland in his new book "Spirit Of The Web", was developed as an open and democratic institution because it was deliberately designed that way and it will remain so only as long as each of us respects these virtues and works to preserve."
This isn't a message most techies want to hear. The flaw in Rowland's otherwise smart and timely argument is that hardly anyone involved with the Internet is working particularly hard to respect these virtues. The Net is stuffed with chaos and hostility as well as information, and is being gobbled up nearly whole by restrictive new government regulations, lawyers and laws, copyright and patent fights, and greedy companies.
The inherently arrogant and increasingly elitist tech culture is myopically convinced that whatever happens to the masses, their salvation is just some new software away, and that programming skills will insulate them from the world beyond.
Rowland's book puts the information age in context. He traces the history of the human urge to communicate -- which he calls one of the most basic of human impulses -- from the drum to the smoke signal to the radio to the Net.
What's unusual about this book is its business-like, professional tone, and that it's so clearly written and intelligently organized. Rowland starts off looking at the real meaning of the Information Age, tracing exactly what impulses made the Web inevitable, and what its real "spirit" might be.
For better or worse, he writes, these are fascinating times, information-wise. "Already, we see a smudging of the boundary between human and machine by the notion of the brain as an elaborate, biological computing device and intelligence as an emergent, perhaps generic quality of complexity in natural systems, and we have the Internet, a network of digital computers, proliferating like an organic creature. Whether in the end substantial or illusory, this strange convergence between the animate and inanimate, the organic and inorganic, seems likely to mark humanity as profoundly as did Copernicus's momentous observation that the earth orbits the sun."
Information is driving much of the growth of the Net and the Web. "Spirit of the Web" is as good and interesting a history of human communications as you're likely to come across,especially if you want to know what the roots of the digital culture really are. There's plenty of research and scholarship in "Spirit of the Web" but it doesn't have the ham-handed obtuseness of many technology books. And it reads nothing like the textbook it could very well be. "Spirit of the Web" is a very good read for anybody who cares about information and how it moves and has moved from one person to another.
Purchase this book at FatBrain.
(That actually was my comment, but /. didn't log me in correctly).
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Private Essayist
OK, fair enough, we will disagree. Now, if Jon was consciously 'misusing' the language, that's different. My assumption is he was being lazy and made a mistake.
Language is constantly changing and we must change with it That's more like it.
Yes, but until the language changes, there are wrong ways and right ways to express something. Since -wise is still only considered informal usage, it is incorrect to use it in formal writing. Again, if Jon feels that he disagrees with accepted usage, and is adding his vote to those who want to formalize the use of -wise, then more power to him and I take back my original comment. But if he just made a lazy mistake, my original comment was valid.
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Bruce
Bruce
You are the real Bruce Perens.
A very apt analogy. In fact, there are commentaries comparing the current attempts to rope off the Net to the range wars of the 1800s which resulted from the invention of barbed wire. See, for instance, this article which describes the history of that time and how it applies to patents and such in our day.
As with the range wars, there were extremists on both sides (some who wanted to rope off every bit of land for themselves at the expense of the public good, and those who wanted to take even private grazing land for themselves). It is an interesting analogy.
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Private Essayist
And like any frontier, eventually it gets civilized.
I wish Katz had been alive 140 years ago, he coudl write his screeds about how barbed wire is destroying the spirit of the West, and schoolmarms are changing the uniqueness of each little prairie town with their lesson plans, and the Indians are being oppressed by settlers.
Here's how a frontier works:
First, someone discovers or invents it (Tim Berners-Lee).
Next people start exploring it. Professionals (like Lewis and Clark or the CERN staff), then hobbyist and amateurs, then unsocial malcontents (like fur traders, mountain men and socially dysfunctional geeks), then people hoping to make loads of money (gold miners, html writing/waiters hoping to charge $100 an hour, hello Razorfish), then people making lots of money (pick ax sellers, Cisco), then homesteaders and businessmen (the farmers, the railroad) and finally the fairer sex (schoolmarms, women, wtc). This is just part of the closing of the web frontier, nothing to get upset about, and about as useful to fight about as fighting about entropy.
If geeks are feeling upset about this, just unil the next geek frontier opens up, just don't complain than there are no women there.
"For better or worse, he writes, these are fascinating times, information-wise. "
Please don't write 'xxxxxxxx-wise'. I would suggest the sentence be re-written such as this:
"For better or worse, he writes, these are fascinating times in the area of information," or "...in the use of information."
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Private Essayist
Katz is right; this is a good review of infomation technology and a great read. But the author has some odd views about advertising on the Web.
I can't remember the details, but I wrote an essay about it and maybe I'll post it on my site. The jist of it is that the author seems to think that advertising on the Web will be so customized and personalized that we will welcome it as content. He doesn't seem to get the idea of 'spam.'
He has a very idealized view of what the Web can be (as Katz does). I'm not sure I share it.
JohnnyB
JohnnyB - johnbowman.net
From the Cambridge International Dictionary of English:
-wise
relating to
What shall we do foodwise - do you fancy going out to eat?
Moneywise, of course, I'm much better off than I used to be.
What do we need to take with us clothes-wise?
We were very lucky weather-wise yesterday.
Browser? I barely know her!
Seriously, I'm sick of people pretending that they have some special privileged access to the normative content of "true spirit" and "final purpose" in these matters. The Web just is -- it's an empirical fact, without any moral dimension. You'd just as well argue about how great life was in Italy before Mount Vesuvius erupted. You might even get some intellectually tired posers to agree with you that indeed, it's a pressing matter that we understand such a historical period because somehow, by some means, it'll be relevent in the present, but get off your high horse, please. The Web was. The Web is. And the Web will still be. And unless you're Bill Gates or Al Gore, you will play no part in choosing its direction.
The Net is stuffed with chaos and hostility as well as information, and is being gobbled up nearly whole by restrictive new government regulations, lawyers and laws, copyright and patent fights, and greedy companies.
Example? Censorware. Greedy companies hack up some obvious AI and push it directly to congressmen who are under pressure to fight smut regardless of how bad the software is. Blocking software is probably the unmentioned example that Katz had in mind while writing: "The Net was developed as an open and democratic institution and it will remain so only as long as each of us respects these virtues and works to preserve."
However, barring threats to my internet access, I think that the deluge of junk is a normal and tolerable consequence of being "open and democratic". It doesn't make "intelligent discourse nearly impossible", it makes all forms of discourse more possible. The key is choice. What should I pay attention to? I just think that the web offers an incredibly useful mechanism (hyperlinking) for finding the good stuff. It's even better than channel surfing or browsing the headlines of a newspaper, especially since hyperlinking scales up nicely to huge amounts of information.