The Laws of the Web: Patterns in the Ecology of Information
Bernardo A. Huberman
ISBN:0262582252
In the past decade, the realm of the internet has grown exponentially. Analysts predict that it will continue to expand, adding new members to the online community from every corner of the globe. While China’s internet penetration rate is around 20% and the U.S. is somewhere around 80% in 2008, online users in China numbered in the 250 million range, surpassing the number of users in the United States, which is around 225 million people currently online. Each year, the reach of the internet as a whole broadens to include more people from more countries. This expansion of the internet has allowed physicists and statisticians to begin drawing an initial framework for a broader social theory of humanity. With the aid of computers, human social and information networks are beginning to be mapped, and the picture coming into focus looks a bit like the physical structure of the known universe. Huberman’s book attempts to show that some of the behavior exhibited by humans in their social and informational networks is predictable and follows prescribed natural laws, much like those that govern the birth and death of the universe. Some of the findings in this book can lead toward more efficient online communities, as well as, on a higher plane of thought, help to explain other collections of matter and energy while our conception of time and space evolves from our known universe to the reality of a multiverse made up of billions of universes just like our own.
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The computer is becoming a mainstream tool that is being used by more and more people around the world for business, research, and social connections. The thing that makes the computer so useful is the fact that as more people come online, the more useful the machines become at gathering, sorting, and sharing information. This increase in information that is collected helps in drawing larger patterns about human behavior in general.
The information that is being collected ranges in application and format. We are all familiar by now with Google’s data collection software that monitors our every move in the digital world; this kind of information is used predominantly for advertising purposes (or so we are told). The information that is collected in vast data storage centers is constantly expanding. These centers house billions of strands of bits that make up our digital selves. Where is this collection of information taking us? What patterns are emerging? What will the powers of authority do with the information? In a way this new world that is being created before our eyes is scary and can be quite troubling when contemplated on a philosophical level, but the potential to use the data to improve our collective society exists.
What we do today with the information that the computer is telling us will define the direction that humanity takes over the course of the next one-hundred years. We will either use these stacks of information as a form of population control or to sell more widgets, or we will use them to find more efficient ways of conducting business and sharing information. As computers and the internet spread from industrialized societies to developing nations, we have a unique opportunity to make capitalism and democratic societies more efficient and more representative. We will either use the internet to enhance the principles of freedom or we will use it to give birth to a sort of socialist societal structure that will keep secret files in an attempt to protect the lives of the privileged.
The computer is quite possibly the tool that will be used to spread the next great evolution in humanity. The industrial revolution that drove most of Europe and United States to the forefront of global dominance was centered around the production of materials through indiscriminate harvesting of resources. This initial sequence of events that encapsulated a period in world history put the planet as whole on a trajectory on which we are still traveling today. We are at the point of near total resource depletion because of the principles enacted during the industrial revolution; and that is with less than a third of the world’s populations living a life that we here in the United States call ‘middle class’. We are in desperate need of reforming the economic and political worlds that we live in.
Before the advent of the computer and ushering in of the Internet Age, ideas spread slowly around the globe. The transference of technology and knowledge in general moved slowly through written documents or oral communication. Now, however, any individual with internet access has the opportunity to influence governmental policy or economic strategy. This structure of information transference has given us each the ability to share our ideas in ways that has the potential to improve the collective society.
This concept of massively distributed communications, websites that ‘go viral’, pages of information and links that almost instantaneously can include millions of stakeholders in decisions that, before now, only governments and businesses made is an all together new step along the human evolutionary chain. No longer can decisions with huge societal implications be made behind closed doors in secret. The information almost always will leak out and then be broadcast to millions of people over the internet, who through the power of a collective voice, will make their interests heard. The internet fosters democracy and freedom of expression.
These online communities that are dedicated to the free sharing of information are beginning to evolve. Social networks allow highlighted information to spread across the internet like a virus. While many people choose to simply view information on the internet and not take action based upon it, more and more people are beginning to find ways to be included in defining the overall structures of government and business dealings. The computer, in comparison to the television, is an interactive device that creates the potential to include millions of stakeholders in important societal decisions.
Central to the idea of an inclusive democracy with equal representation is the concept of a forum large enough to house and organize all of the disparate information that comes in from interested stakeholders. Computers and the internet act as this medium. People are represented by bits of information flashed digitally across wires over great distances that record and catalog their interests. There is no more need for physical spaces big enough to house millions or billions of people. These digital data collection centers can influence governmental policies and the executive board decisions of successful businesses.
While the concept of collective development is easy to imagine on a governmental level, it is harder to see how businesses would benefit from having millions of users direct the development of a singular product. For starters, many businesses have separate design and production facilities. Take the automobile industry as an example. Cars are designed, and then once a design is decided upon, the concept is brought into production. Many times, problems are found during production or even post-production and usually result in lost revenue for the company, or worse yet, wasted resources. A community of collaborators, design and production staffs all working together simultaneously hooked together through the internet, has the potential to create a vastly more efficient production process than one department could have produced on their own. Now, add the consumer into the internet loop, and what you have is a streamlined production process of a product that uses the least amount of resources, and one that is highly desirable to the general public. What more could a company want?
The idea that collaboration can increase not only efficiency, but also sales is an idea that is ultimately going to end up fundamentally transforming the way that businesses manufacture resources into consumable goods.
Lifecycle assessment software, or LCA software, is the name of an emerging field in computer science. LCA software brings together all of the people affected by a product as it moves through its lifecycle curve. For example, let’s look at the lifecycle of the computer. Now that we know about the dangerous levels of toxins that are being put into our computers, we have a choice. We know that most of our computers, once their technology becomes obsolete, are being shipped to developing nations as e-waste because industrialized nations forbid the dumping of toxic metals and chemicals into landfills; so, we are faced with another choice. We also know that this e-waste is responsible for depositing toxic metals and chemicals in the soil and water halfway around the globe; another choice. This series of choices we are making is a direct result of our lifestyle we choose to live in industrialized nations!
Well, for the first time in capitalism’s history, thanks in part rapid spread of information over the internet, manufacturers can make choices, knowing the full consequences of their decisions, and consumers have the power, tools, and methods to force manufacturers to consider sustainable methods, and factor the demands of all stakeholders into the decision making process.
Industry moguls are beginning to realize the amount of money that can be saved by cleaning up their acts, that is, they are beginning to use computer software that can not only tell manufacturers the most cost efficient material to use in the production of some particular consumable, but it also can inform these manufacturers of the ecological footprint that individual materials make. Business executives can now begin to make decisions that weigh costs, not only in relation to finance, but ones that also consider any environmental or social costs that, up until now, got distributed haphazardly in the form of unwanted waste to the least represented populations of the world.
LCA software, by definition, is “a computer program that can be used to calculate the potential environmental impacts of a product or a service throughout its lifecycle, from being manufactured to its ultimate end-use destination”. The software helps product and service designers estimate social, environmental, and financial costs associated with extracting resources, manufacturing products, recycling programs, and end-use disposal of the waste created by manufacturing and consuming their product. This is truly revolutionary.
The idea that businesses are figuring triple-bottom line (environmental, social, and financial) costs into the their production processes is trickling into many of today’s biggest industries. For example, many of the largest industrial companies are pursuing closed-loop refineries; the most advanced of these, in the near-future, will capture their own CO2 from the smokestacks, pipes it to algae ponds that use the CO2 for photosynthesis, which then are harvested for energy. A former waste product, CO2, is now an input asset into another system that uses it as a feedstock to grow hyperactive algae. This closed-loop thinking is generating excitement around its potential to solve some of the society’s most dramatic climate issues regarding pollution.
Collaborative software, social software, and massively distributed collaborative projects will only maintain value as long as computers remain an active and sustainable extension of daily interactions. For now, though, there are many exciting developments in this field. The computer programs that are being developed allow their users to interact and share information among all of the other users. Of course, YouTube, eBay, Napster, Wikipedia all have their roots in these types of programs, but it’s the next generation of collaborative software that has entered the industrial side of society.
More specifically, lifecycle assessment software is essentially a form of cooperation among interested parties where information-sharing systems are the centerpiece of the organization. Calculating the recycling costs of a particular material that goes into making a shoe, as well as which glues are the least toxic to use to hold it together is a refinement of the trade of production in general. It is the evolution of business. Capitalism is evolving to come more in line with the laws of the universe. Creation is a natural process; there is no waste in the act of creation. In nature, every waste product is used as an input for another creative system.
Almost every current industrial process that we use to manufacture products or services has a negative impact on the environment. For the first time in capitalism’s short history, natural resources have found their limit. Conservation, as well as recycling waste streams, is a promising way forward for the future populations of humankind. Lifecycle assessment software like SimaPro and Eco-it are only ahead of their time by less than a decade. By 2022, the business world will have evolved to incorporate these kinds of environmental assessment tools into the mainstream.
The original aim of LCA software was to offer product and service designers the opportunity to compare a range of environmental damages based on their input. It is evolving into an industry that will streamline the production process as a whole in a way that is not only good for the triple-bottom line but also good for the planet. Once, as a collective society, we put a real value on clean air, water, and soil, LCA software will be the standard in all new product development.
For the first time, businesses are considering such concepts as global warming and greenhouse gasses, acid rain, soil degradation, depletion of fossil fuel deposits, deforestation, spreading of deserts, air pollution and smog, food toxins, death rates, water sources drying up or being poisoned, and animal extinctions as important considerations in their business decisions. More importantly, this way of thinking is what the business world is evolving into. These considerations will become the standard over the course of the next one-hundred years.
__________web recommendation
Earth Shift
www.earthshift.com
Many new environmental assessment consultancy firms are springing up. EarthShift is an example of the type of consultation today’s most innovative businesses are seeking. This firm uses LCA software to help businesses figure the total cost assessment, or TCA, of their product line. Companies like this one are part of a larger movement, which is taking place among people on the earth; that is, a redefinition of what resources have real value. For instance, what is more valuable, petroleum or water? Did you answer water? So many fresh water sources are ruined in our exploration for more fossil fuels, so it would seem from looking at our business models that we value fossil fuels more than we value clean water, air, and soil. The idea that we allow business to pursue fossil fuels at the expense of humanity’s needs is not an accurate picture of what people want out of life on earth. Petroleum has many substitutes; water has none. There is a larger shift coming to the business world, and lifecycle assessment software is contributing the initial steps on the road to placing real value on the resources we value most.
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