We've
come a long way. Web 1.0, no small miracle itself, was largely about
getting access to, and mobilizing, information on a scale unprecedented
in history. Web 2.0 has been about what Tim O'Reilly calls creating "an
architecture of participation", changing the role of 'user' from
searcher and reader to sharer and collaborator. The term 'social
networking' describes the core of this, but what's going on (today) at
its edges -- peer production, open source, activism -- goes well beyond
just connecting, towards doing things together, things that make a
difference.
The Web is a complex
phenomenon: It has more variables affecting its evolution than anyone
could ever hope to identify or analyze, and its properties are emergent.
The result is therefore, like nature and other complex phenomena, not
always pretty and rarely efficient, but resilient, innovative and
effective. We still long to, and try to, reduce it to a 'manageable'
merely complicated phenomenon: We develop applications that are
centralized or top down and require everyone to learn one way of doing
things and behave in a common way (most of the failed first-generation
social networking tools suffer from this impossible, in complex
systems, requirement). We try to map it, manage it, analyze it, complicate it. Corporatists want, and try, to control it.
So
trying to make it work is a paradox: We want to improve it, make it
more useful, but we know we cannot manage it. We have to adapt ourselves
to it, and be content to do things at its edges, where everything of
value on the Web is created and where everything is happening. Think of
it as a generous open market with several billion stalls, where all the
sellers are also buyers, splitting their time among offering, seeking,
understanding others' offerings, and co-developing new offerings with
others, and where so much is just given away.
By allowing us to see, and filter, and organize in our own minds, those
billions of offerings, the web has made this market, which would
otherwise be chaotic and unfathomable, merely complex -- not
manageable, but workable.
In order to be truly workable, to be not only a place for fascinating discovery but a place for changing the world, the Web needs to evolve nine capacities that it currently promises but does not really deliver:
- The capacity to focus attention on what's important.
As Bill Maher said, "The purpose of the media is to make what's
important interesting." Take a look at what's attracting the most
attention online and I think you'll admit it's what's entertaining, not
what's important. What used to be 'information overload' is now a
dangerous distraction, an immense waste of time we cannot afford. Who's
to say what's important? All of us, collectively, equally, without regard to our wealth, our title, or our advertising budget.
- The capacity to suggest practical action.
We are all information junkies, but too often what we learn is not
immediately actionable, or not actionable at all. The way to add value
to information is to explain (a) what it means, and (b) what we can and
should do about it now. If it will only be actionable later, then we
need to be able to capture a pointer to it so we can and do find it then, without having to rely on memory.
- The capacity to enable self-managed networks, exchanges and peer production. We need to be able to find and organize people to do things we can't do
ourselves, and create exchanges of expertise and specialized goods that
strengthen local economies (and make them more self-sufficient) and
facilitate trade and peer production with those outside the local community free from high-markup, low-value-added
oligopolistic middlemen. We are all potentially
simultaneously producers and consumers, and Web-based 'markets' are
evolving to be totally unlike the hierarchical 'producer-consumer'
markets that view us, as Jerry Michalski puts it, as "gullets to
consume products and crap cash". We need Web-based networks, exchanges
and peer production partnerships that allow us, in our capacities as
producers and consumers, to
co-develop ideas and offerings that meet our collective needs. The
current Web infrastructure, with unlimited download (consumption)
capacity but constrained upload (production) capacity, just won't do.
And most first-generation social networking tools are too centralized,
complicated and limiting -- we need to evolve our own, self-managed, intuitive and peer-to-peer.
- The capacity to enable self-directed education.
We learn best by doing, not by being told. We all learn differently at
different paces, and we all want and need to learn different things.
You want to change the world? Move entire curricula onto the Web. Then
help develop the $99 solar or crank-powered satellite-wifi-enabled
computer, add the $99 to the price of every more extravagant computer
sold, and give the $99 computers away to those in struggling nations
and to our own poor. Airdrop them instead of bombs and watch poverty
and terrorism fade away.
- The capacity to reveal deliberately-hidden truths.
Most actionable information is local, and much of this is information
that some would prefer you not know, like local frauds, bribes,
intimidation and other corruption, polluters, cases of abuse of family
members and animals, rigged tenders, rezoning applications and
approvals etc. This is information that local indymedia would provide
if they had the resources. With the web, we can become
the local indymedia, and organize and offer our unlimited resources to
surface truths we can do something about right in our own communities.
We might even be able to leverage this power to 'out' suppressed truths
at higher levels of political and corporate governance.
- The capacity to drive and disseminate innovations.
Corporatists are doing everything they can to buy and lock up every
conceivable idea and innovation. The Web can set ideas and innovations
free. Ideas are still cheap, but innovations are all about how to
implement an idea successfully -- minimizing the risk of failure and
giving investors in the implementation a reasonable return for their
time, energy and money. In implementation, the devil is in the details.
'Best practices' can't capture enough of those details to be useful,
and the 'case studies' you learn in university are full of self-serving
distortions and dangerous oversimplifications. In order for the Web to
drive and disseminate innovations, we all need to learn and teach and
practice effective innovation processes, and volunteer to give away
the details of implementations, including the war stories and
embarrassing failures. Since "we know more than we can say and can say
more than we can write down" (Dave Snowden), that knowledge must be, in
part, conveyed substantially in stories, conversations and through
direct observation. Web 2.0 needs to evolve to facilitate this.
- The capacity to embrace complexity.
Since Web 2.0 is itself complex, this may seem a bit recursive, so bear
with me. Changing the world is about addressing, coping with, problems.
The problem-solving methods used in most large organizations, taught in
most universities, and proffered by most experts and consultants are
designed for complicated problems, those that, with enough information,
energy and expenditure can be run to the ground and 'solved'. Complex
problems are 'wicked',
and complicated problem-solving techniques are largely ineffectual in
dealing with them. That's why these problems are so intractable, and
why every couple of years there's another set of 'big ideas' and
consultants trying, once again, and invariably with little success, to
'solve' them. There are approaches, such as Open Space, that are designed to address complex problems. Web 2.0 needs to accommodate them.
- The capacity to provide trust, equitable access and participation in all its offerings.
The presence of trust on the Web is both its greatest strength and its
greatest weakness -- its strength because without trust there is no
credibility and hence no value, and its weakness because when that
trust is violated -- when something online is found to be untrue or
wildly exaggerated -- the damage to the entire Web is huge. Spam and
Phishing, exemplars of untruth, are therefore huge threats to the Web,
and the opportunities for even worse abuses of trust have barely been
tapped. Just as serious as the threats to credibility are the
corporatist threats to create a two-tier Internet, widening the access
asymmetries between rich and poor and between powerful producers and
the rest of us to a chasm. If the Internet is an Eden of information
and opportunity, the trust saboteurs like Spammers and Phishers are its
toxic chemicals and the two-tier Internet its exclusionary barbed-wire
fences. And while tools like blogs and wikis do allow universal
participation in Web 2.0, and while the Long Tail epitomizes its depth
and resiliency, that Long Tail is also a threat: Late joiners to Web
2.0 are finding it harder and harder to be heard, to find an audience,
to be treated as equals in this bold and democratic experiment. We
pioneers had it easy -- the best 'spaces' were there for the taking. We
need to welcome, help, and make room for the new immigrants to
cyberspace.
- The capacity to be simple and intuitive to use.
This doesn't mean misrepresenting what's complex as simple. We need to
recognize the complexity as we design and evolve applications and
networks, but pack that complexity under the hood so that people (especially the 80% of the world that is still on the other side of the digital divide) don't need to understand that complexity to be able to realize Web 2.0's benefits.
Is
there a point in outlining these needed capacities, when I've already
admitted that the Web is unmanageable, that no one is "in charge"? When
so many users of the Web are interested in it only as a source of cheap
porn, a diversion for escapist games and celebrity trivia, a market for
their fraud and crap, and a vent for their helpless rage, how can we
'trust' the crowd to evolve it into anything other than an ocean of
dreck, another abused and abandoned victim of The Tragedy of the
Commons?
Web 2.0 will be what it will be. It is, like nature and
other complex systems, remarkably resilient. If we can keep the
corporatists from turning it into a self-serving commercial enterprise,
and keep the screens glowing when cheap oil runs out, there is no
reason why it can't change the world, perhaps even save it. A lot of
people realize the importance of developing the nine capacities above,
and are guiding their on-line energies to helping those capacities to
emerge and evolve. Amazing what a few billion people can do when they
work together. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
