I'm reading a nice little book by Steven Johnson called Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. It's the first one I've read of his and had heard a little about before hand. Mixed reviews mostly. But I'm enjoying the hell out of it.
One section in particular caught my mind's eye tonight. It was a few pages long discussion of the Web as an emergent system. I had read other things about this idea before in a couple other places (and I'm always looking for more since it's a big part of my thesis) as well as some broad collective intelligence ideas (Teilhard), that are kind of going off in tangents as far as I'm concerned, but Johnson's discussion in particular inadvertantly shed some new light on the subject for me. <<run-on sentence
Most of what I've read concerning the Web as a complex system capable of emergent properties has been very cautious with proclaiming it that. They, Johnson included, don't really feel that the Web has that ability. That it shouldn't be compared with brains, cities, insect colonies, living cells, etc., because it, mostly, doesn't learn from it's mistakes. More specifically, it's based on a linked series of hypertext documents that intrinsically don't have the ability to reference each other and know exactly how they are linked together and how a user navigates between them. They obviously aren't programmed that way. To them the Web is a jumble of information that never becomes organized and that can't become organized. A good example to show this is the rise of the search engine. Google has built a fortune on making an engine that tries to predict what website you want just by typing random words that may or may not be found anywhere within the metatag info or headers or anywhere in that page. And they can even then only do a half-assed job. All this just goes to show that the Web isn't a system that learns and emerges new properties, it's one that is stagnant and one that we have to create new tools for in order to use it to its fullest extent.
Here's where I come in. I read that and I think "Why does the Web's success as a complex system have to be defined by it's ability to link pages together more efficiently?" And then I realize, these authors aren't likely actual Web users and, dare I say, aficionados. They haven't grown up with the Web and been immersed in it for half of their lives. They haven't designed Web sites for hours and hours on end while constantly thinking, how can I improve this one little navigation practice which would then improve the overall useability of the entire site, while at the same time balancing it with accessibility, or furiously argued with some random stranger on a random forum over who's better--Kirk or Picard. They see the Web as purely the thing it was built to be. A series of documents that can help you get information faster. For them, it's purely a research tool or a way for them to buy a book more easily than if they went to a store downtown, or a way to find music faster, and on and on. But on and on in the wrong direction. They've narrowed their view of the Web so much that they've failed to see the emergence in the other areas--the social, the gaming, the sexual, the influencing of humanity--all around them.
To me, and millions of other people whether they've thought about it or not, those other areas are the best parts of the Web. They're what make the Web great. These are the things that the original designers never dreamed of. I don't see how they could have dreamed of it. That's what makes good emergence. You don't see it coming. The anonymity, the structure, the aesthetics, the underlying architecture and tons of other complex areas of the Web are what have come together and produced Second Life, Myspace, Wikipedia, Facebook, Digg, Youtube, and all these new and unimaginable communities of people and websites. This is the emergence of the Web. The social emergence. After all, we created the Web, so we are it's feedback loop, it's inherent property, and the essence of it's emergence.
It's Picard, by the way.
I know it's a relatively old topic in the development world, but dammit, Extension is a marvelous concept. It can't be talked about enough. Every software application that can be feasibly built to be extended by entrepreneurical developers should be without hesitation. There should be entire teams at the biggest software companies--if there aren't already--devoted to extension. Seeing the wonderful things that have been done by Mozilla, Apple, Adobe, and sometimes Microsoft in regards to their programs and allowing users like you and me change and update their functionality, leaves no room for excuses from other big companies.
If you're any kind of beginning to intermediate level programmer, developer, software designer, or whatever then I seriously recommend delving into creating extensions (or whatever the particular environment calls them) for programs like Firefox, Thunderbird, Photoshop, Windows shells, Linux and so on as a novel way to get your feet wet. Most of them are free and surprisingly easy to use. I especially recommend Mozilla's stuff. I'm just now getting heavy into it with my thesis and I must say I am already seeing some huge potential, not only from a technical standpoint but an artistic one as well.
Part of my personal philosophy is adapting the cold and technical world of computer science to the beauty and personality of high concept art. And with extension development it makes artistic development worlds easier. Without having to worry about low-level programming and long hours of debugging, you can focus on developing your artistic ideas and concepts more and how to implement them into the existing software applications. This produces better quality work in a fraction of the time. It also allows you to more easily bring in outside ideas to your design and thinking processes and come up with new ways to adapt them to that particular application.
With the popularity of extending your OS, browsers, and various other applications that you use on a day to day basis, constantly rising, I can foresee a time when virtually everything in our world can be hacked, customized and utilized to it's fullest potential. A potential that is limited and defined by you and only you.
Here are some links you can use to get yourself into that extension frame of mind.
My personal favorite site. Provides Internet oddity links and a wonderful forum.
You should already know this site, but in case you don't, go there for hundreds of free fonts.
If you're not taking advantage of Mozilla, you need to be. This site shows you how.
Justin Cone's motion graphics and broadcast design site. The cutting edge of design.