John Miedema

Is the web changing us? Nicholas Carr (Is Google Making Us Stupid?) has come out with a new book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains. It’s next on my reading list. I share Carr’s feeling that information technology is rewiring my neural circuitry. It’s a “distant” feeling, happening in the background, slowly. It’s not all bad. I can manage a lot more information these days. I’m a fan of information technology. Google is a brilliant resource for starting searches, just not for ending them, at least not for complex questions. The web is perfectly engineered for answering small questions, for managing bits of information, but I find myself trying to use it for complex ones too. If only I enter the right keywords, if only I scan enough feeds, if only I manage my data properly, I will get the answers I seek. My behaviour fits with the patterns described by complexity theory.

Francis Heylighen wrote a nice, non-technical introduction to complexity theory (download PDF) for the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences. Complexity is an emerging scientific field that identifies the organizational patterns of non-trivial systems. One generally accepted feature of complexity is that it is situated between order and disorder, not entirely static, nor completely chaotic. This is where life, intelligence and creation unfold. It is the territory of complex questions. The web is a mix of order and chaos. Does Yahoo Answers have the right balance?

Complex systems tend toward self-organization when certain conditions are present. The system must have components that are distinct and connected. They are distinct enough to be independently motivated. These components are called agents because they move toward a preferred state; they have goals. Agents include people, animals, firms, cells, and molecules. They are connected in an environment in such a way that their actions affect each other. Their interactions begin locally, but if the overall effect is not dampened, and is instead amplified, a larger pattern of self-organization emerges. Competitive and cooperative processes lead to a more complex and stable state. These patterns are witnessed in weather, the stock exchange, the spread of diseases, ecosystems, and the evolution of life. The more similar the agents, the more quickly and consistently the pattern will form. No single agent is indispensable. Any agent could die and the larger system will carry on. When the larger system is formed, the agent subordinates its original goals to the efficient functioning of the larger organization. Is that what is happening to my neural circuitry though web use? Am I compromising my original questions to serve the efficient operation of the web?

The outcome of self-organizing complexity is unpredictable, but these systems tend to share certain characteristics. The system is a “small world” in which agents can easily interact with one another. They cluster with other agents of a similar nature, like birds of a feather. They also tend to form hubs of centralized activity. Heylighen observes these hubs in journal citations, where certain publications tend to get cited much more often than others. The features are characteristic of the web. Since the outcome of these systems cannot be predicted, perhaps answers to complex questions are still possible. I will mull on this.