Wanna Talk?

Three things, and the somewhat meandering connections between them:

Last Friday I got an email from Mike Täht, pointing me toward an entry on his weblog, Postcards from the Bleeding Edge, titled The Inner Workings of the Internet Mind, that considers both the vast number of connections between net users and the speed at which communications travel between users. Taken together, number of users plus speed of transmission, the picture formed is not a linear one of people exchanging letters, in the manner of a ping-pong ball bouncing between two paddles, but more like that of a firework exploding in a night sky, sparks shooting out in all directions, each one itself a firework shooting more sparks. At one point, Mike writes:

Each mind on the internet is already in something more complex than a hypersphere, already potentially connected to n minds, where n = the number of users on the net. But we don't have telepathy, what we have is approximations for it (text, pictures, moving pictures, voice) that we've encapsulated in technology that can transmit at nearly lightspeed. We're actually connected in something more like a fractal pattern.

I mentioned a few days ago that I'm reading Dr. Ursula Franklin's The Real World of Technology, and that in it she looks at some of the basic social pattern changes in communication and conversation brought about by telephone, broadcast services and email.

In Chapter VII, the first of the 1999 additions, she writes:

The profound impact of writing, as a technology, lies in the fact that writing allows the physical separation of the message from the messenger or sender. When Hammurabi set down the details of Babylon's laws or Moses proclaimed the ten commandments, the "writ" became the message that would survive the writer/sender and could be brought to distant places.*

[...]

Oral traditions do not codify transmission and interpretation of laws and values in the way that textually based societies do. Indeed, strict adherence to the letter of the law is only possible when the letter of the writ exists and carries with it the belief in its authority almost regardless of context.**

[...]

... we are not dealing here merely with recasting an old task — that of sending and receiving messages — into a new technological setting. We have to deal with different and quite new social relationships that now superimpose existing ones. As well, cyberspace has become not only the new channel of transmission, but also a new realm of storage, assembly, and distribution of information.†

Speaking of "storage, assembly, and distribution of information," in the last two or three weeks, Shelley Powers has written several entries on the FOAF (friend-of-a-friend) concept as it is generally understood (I know Mike, Mike knows Doc Searls, Doc knows damn near everyone), and the intricacies of incorporating it within RDF (or is it vice versa?) and the Semantic Web:

I Wanna Hold Your Hand from July 23.

FOAF and Web of Trust also from July 23. (no longer available)

Context and Meaning from July 24.

FOAF, Flocking, and the Semantics of Starlings from July 30. (no longer available)

I'm not quite sure what the Semantic Web is, really, but it appears to be a multi-pronged effort to define how everything online connects to everything else in terms of the reasons for each connection, not just that a connection exists.

In FOAF terms, "knows" equates to an assertion of some form of link between one person and another. Such a link may be reciprocated, but it doesn't have to be. When it is, it becomes what I would call a conversation. Conversation is a neutral term, implying neither agreement nor disagreement, and avoids hinting at any relationship between the concerned parties other than that of an ongoing communication. Also, it allows for more than two people to be part of the link.

For Mike, conversation is a connection that begins in one's own head:

I like to think of that initial conversation as an extension of talking to oneself, where thought = talking to oneself. First you engage in personal reflection, then you look for a reflection from someone else. It's rare that you submit that first thought to someone you don't like. Sometimes you get good feedback, and the conversation extends.

When I think about the reciprocal connections between people on the Web as being conversations, and also that those connections are made overwhelmingly via writing, then that suggests to me that at least one of the major changes wrought by the internet is that of writing becoming speech in ways that go beyond the simple back-and-forth of instant messaging or chat. Writing on the Web has still the advantages of retaining its form and meaning over time and distance, just as it has had for hundreds of years, but to that now has been added the essence of equals conversing — just a couple of folks, sitting around talking, multiplied a million times over.

* pp135-6.

** p136.

† p144.