Socialmania: fertility, software, the topography of flow
September 24, 2008
flow chart of my web existence
.
I got dizzy today, so I made this flowchart (pdf). Things I’m learning:
1. I’ve been signing up for things left and right. Time to cool it. Go hang out with some real people, etc.
2. This is a good way to make decisions like, “do I NEED to sign up for reddit?”
3. The fecundity of the internet is a function of its capacity for abstraction. RSS etc., the abstraction of content, opened up space for a new class of meta-tools [eg. aggregators] — and it bloomed. Then those meta-tools abstracted their data by sharing APIs, and THEY became building blocks. Now meta-meta-tools like pipes let you build meta-tools. This is astonishing and beautiful, a lesson in morphogenesis that the arts ignore at their peril. I will probably repeat this idea six million times in my life, so get ready.
4. Stepping back and taking everything in the diagram together, what I have built is software. If you plug two programs together, you’re developing software. We are making a collective transition to everyone (online) developing software. This probably resembles early homo sapiens initial transition to language (also an escalation in abstraction, according to Julian Jaynes), and may be as significant.
5. Our network metaphor (connections, nodes) is on its way out the door. Look what a mess my diagram is, and now imagine I included email, my nings, or a single other person. A flowchart would be almost completely useless! As nodes increasingly consist of data passing through, rather than residing in, and as connections multiply, overlap, combine and diverge, the network model will be as useful to the web as Newtonian atomic billiards is to predicting ocean currents. Yes, the internet is undergoing a phase change — from solid to liquid — or at least our mental model of it is. The words “Internet” and “web” will hang around long after they are meaningless. It is less and less a ‘web’ than a topography of flow. Hopefully connectionist cognitive science will have this epiphany too. (This model reaches as far back as Lucretius, whom I recommend approaching through Michel Serres‘ Birth of Physics).
Socialmania: fertility, software, the topography of flow
September 24, 2008flow chart of my web existence
I got dizzy today, so I made this flowchart (pdf). Things I’m learning:
1. I’ve been signing up for things left and right. Time to cool it. Go hang out with some real people, etc.
2. This is a good way to make decisions like, “do I NEED to sign up for reddit?”
3. The fecundity of the internet is a function of its capacity for abstraction. RSS etc., the abstraction of content, opened up space for a new class of meta-tools [eg. aggregators] — and it bloomed. Then those meta-tools abstracted their data by sharing APIs, and THEY became building blocks. Now meta-meta-tools like pipes let you build meta-tools. This is astonishing and beautiful, a lesson in morphogenesis that the arts ignore at their peril. I will probably repeat this idea six million times in my life, so get ready.
4. Stepping back and taking everything in the diagram together, what I have built is software. If you plug two programs together, you’re developing software. We are making a collective transition to everyone (online) developing software. This probably resembles early homo sapiens initial transition to language (also an escalation in abstraction, according to Julian Jaynes), and may be as significant.
5. Our network metaphor (connections, nodes) is on its way out the door. Look what a mess my diagram is, and now imagine I included email, my nings, or a single other person. A flowchart would be almost completely useless! As nodes increasingly consist of data passing through, rather than residing in, and as connections multiply, overlap, combine and diverge, the network model will be as useful to the web as Newtonian atomic billiards is to predicting ocean currents. Yes, the internet is undergoing a phase change — from solid to liquid — or at least our mental model of it is. The words “Internet” and “web” will hang around long after they are meaningless. It is less and less a ‘web’ than a topography of flow. Hopefully connectionist cognitive science will have this epiphany too. (This model reaches as far back as Lucretius, whom I recommend approaching through Michel Serres‘ Birth of Physics).
6. I still love Omnigraffle.