check out this homage/illustration/explanation of Web 2.0:
Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us
Michael Welsh, Assistant Professor In Cultural Anthropology, Kansas State University
This clip brings up a really interesting distinction between HTML and XML (first and second gen web languages). To quote Mr. Welsh:
"HTML was designed to define the structure of a web document...form and content became inseparable...In XML, form and content are described separately, allowing data to be exported free of formatting."
As a result of added flexibility, XML allows data to flow more freely from site to site. This produces a far more sophisticated platform for the manipulation of data, one in which content can be organized through patterns of use, and in fact this patterning of content becomes content in its own right, in the sense that it retains its own identity and can be manipulated through further patterning operations. This opens the door to the emergence recursive feedback in the system, creating differentiation in the surface of the network, varying degrees of ossification/plasticity. This strikes me highly similar to network models of biological intelligence: populations of neurons self-organizing through repetitive use to form cohesive (and increasingly repeatable) patterns of thought.
Could we venture to say, then, that when pattern-making become more essential - more present - than content, the internet becomes a sufficient contextual framework for intelligent behavior and self-organization - a language, if you will.
*this post has been edited in response to comments, more elaboration to come.
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2 comments:
To be honest, I'm having a little difficulty following you but I'm sure the idea has great import and as a result is producing a fair amount of "excitability" if you will, within you. I'm finding it difficult to see how The Delphi Method becomes introduced, unless you're suggesting that the wiki methodology is in fact part of this trend. I'm also having difficulty unpacking, "This begs the question: is it when patterning becomes more essential - more present - than content that the Internet becomes a language?" When you say patterning, what are you reffering to? Does patterning not in fact involve a fair amount of content? Is your idea of patterning not a kind of dynamic symbiosis between information-content-of various kinds? Again, not to burst your intellectual excitability but I think it may use some clearing up..?
Fair enough, a bit more elaboration is in order. Not sure this post will suffice, but I'll take a crack.
I think you are right to question the distinction between content and patterning (by which I mean the organization of content). In Web2.0, patterning creates new content - metacontent, content bundled into/by specific patterns - which itself is subject to new patterning operations. For many sites, the social networking sites in particular, these patterns are the content - my facebook identity is defined primarily through my friends and the in-site interactions (wall post, etc.) i have with them (as opposed to the content I have entered into my profile).
One the other hand, there are many other Web2.0 sites, such as wikipedia, that are very much content-based. The efficacy of these sites reside in their evolving body of data and the community of editors, hackers and vandals that interact with it. The landscape of links that connect the different entries is really straight-up Web1.0 stuff - incapable of fostering recursive patterning.
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