The Well and the Cathedral

I enjoyed this entry in Paleo-Future about a book from 1997 that predicts the future of the internet. The book’s author argues that it was too difficult to find information on the internet since it lacks a Dewey Decimal System. Let the indexing begin!

The lack of an equivalent to the Dewey decimal system on the Internet is a different matter. While it is true that experienced Internet users can eventually find what they’re looking for, [Clifford] Stoll and other critics insist that it takes more expertise and time than Internet enthusiasts are willing to admit. This point of contention may eventually be answered by software developments that are still just blips on the horizon. But such a development, according to many experts, including both Internet boosters and doubters, is likely to have to await a formalized method for paying royalties to those who self-publish on the Internet. Bill Gates is sure this can be managed down the line, but as things stand there are still vast legal tangles to be resolved concerning payment to original authors whose work is published by major companies, let alone compensation for self-publishing.

Richard Powers, author of stunning works of fiction like Plowing the Dark and less glamorous but still layered and nuanced roman a clefs like Prisoner’s Dilemma, writes about the nascent world wide web in Galatea 2.2:

For a while, I felt a low-grade thrill at being alive in the moment when this unprecedented thing congealed. But after weeks of jetting around the hypermap, I began to see the web as just the latest term in an ancient polynomial expansion. Each nick on the time line spit out some fitful precursor. Everyone who ever lived had lived at a moment of equal astonishment.

This from 1995, nearly 15 years ago. This kind of reflection means much more than just consideration of the current “term in polynomial expansion.” Listening to the voices of users of the first years of popular use of the internet can carry valuable insight. Even better are voices from the more nascent days of media theory, before the birth or popularization of the internet. If the medium is the message, where does that leave the user? Addicted to Adderal? Incapable of recalling trivia without consulting the oracle or are we more informed than ever? On my way to work I usually think of a handful of questions or concepts I want to look up that day, such as “what’s the difference between a sweet potato and a yam?” or “where does the person with the world record for the longest fingernails live?” Usually I look these things up and forget after a few weeks or months (except for an exceptionally amazing piece of trivia, such as income distribution on the west side versus the east side of Cincinnati). Many websites, especially sites for larger TV networks, are beginning to look and function more like television. We’ve all probably heard the internet called “TV for smart people.” It’s important to consider the big picture when designing for the user; it helps keep your eye on the end result.

And if we listen to Marshall McLuhan, what is all that content there for anyway? Why organize it in a sensible way? Richard Powers has an answer:

The web was a neighborhood more efficiently lonely than the one it replaced. Its solitude was bigger and faster. When relentless intelligence finally completed its program, when the terminal drop box brought the last barefoot, abused child on line and everyone could at last say anything instantly to everyone else in existence, it seemed to me we’d still have nothing to say to each other and many more ways not to say it.

The man also has something to say about librarians. I had to ponder this one for a minute; it’s not insulting but it might not address the boggling array of fuels available at the pump.

“Librarian is a service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind” – Richard Powers

Six years after learning about Michael Pollan’s book The Botany of Desire from a botanist friend, I finally got around to delving in. The theory is one of those mind-stretching exercises found in the most engaging pop science books:

Depending on the environment in which a species finds itself, different adaptations will avail. Mutations that nature would have rejected out of hand in the wild sometimes prove to be brilliant adaptations in an environment that’s been shaped by human desire.

This in the middle of a chapter about the history of the tulip, a flower I’ve felt endeared to since reading Jeanette Winterson’s The Powerbook. We’ve been taught that plant evolution is a force of nature outside of human forces until we capture this force and manipulate it. But what if these mutations that would never work in nature compel humans to take this plant and multiply it like crazy? Pollan applies this to the apple, the tulip, the potato and marijuana. In talking about the tulip, he emphasizes the appeal of symmetry:

… but the appearance of symmetry is a reliable expression of formal organization – of purpose, even intent. Symmetry is an unmistakable sign that there’s relevant information in a place. That’s because symmetry is a property shared by a relatively small number of things in the landscape, all of them of keen interest to us. [...] Symmetry is also a sign of health in a creature, since mutations and environmental stresses can easily disturb it. So paying attention to symmetrical things makes good sense: symmetry is usually significant.

The same holds true for bees. How do we know? Because symmetry in a plant is an extravagance (whereas animals who want to move in a straight line can’t do without it), and natural selection probably wouldn’t go to the trouble if the bees didn’t reward the effort.

But if the pleasure bees and people take in flowers have a common root, standards of floral beauty soon begin to specialize and diverge – and not just bee from boy, but bee from bee as well. For it seems that different kinds of bees are attracted to different kinds of symmetry. Honeybees favor the radial symmetry of daisies and clover and sunflowers, while bumblebees prefer the bilateral symmetry of orchids, peas, and foxgloves. Whatever the case, the more perfect the symmetry, the healthier – and therefore sweeter – the flower.

Suddenly in the midst of all of this botany narrative business is a paragraph about formal organization, purpose and intent. It’s the kind of pontification that addresses the most root issues of information organization. Here is symmetry, which we as a species utilize for nearly all of our information in some way or another. And here is a suggestion that different types of bees are attracted to different kinds of symmetry, much in the same way that different types of people seek different kinds of information. All of these connections emerge, especially relevant in my life where I help people find information at the library as well as help people organize and present information through my web development work. SQL, Joomla!, WordPress, various search engines for specific purposes give people (and especially me since I use them all the time) tools and lenses through which we work with information.

How do we organizers, presenters and retrievers of information take this way of seeing information, mutation, and evolution and take it from theory into praxis? By using advanced methods of organizing information we can take the most basic, oldest ideas and translate them into something useful. The power of many people influencing content, creating mutations and evolving has resulted in some of the greatest and fastest growing successes on the internet. Of special note is Firefox, which has rightfully and righteously carved out a bigger piece of browser use statistic pie than Internet Explorer. The superior product was developed by a whole army of programmers and regular old internet users. Of course, Wikipedia and Facebook would have never been successful without their user-generated content.

This bottom-up organizing has been criticized for producing unreliable or inconsistent results. However, this is what evolution is all about. These are the mutations that bring about improvements.