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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.
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.