Just thought I’d summarise my current thinking by mashing together some of the graphical elements from the previous posts on Metcalfe’s Law, how convergence is rending meaning irrelevant and the Surfing the Edge of Chaos into a single graphic.
Needless to say it means something to me but I suspect that by now I have lost most of you in translation.
The next question of course is does memory (e.g. Tags and Markers, Tweets and Likes) provide meaning to the network or is it simply a reflection the illusion of structure projected across the chaotic soup?
It is an important question because as we have seen before The Wisdom of Crowds is about the “Silent Ballot”. The trend towards accumulating public memory tags to provide meaning to the network has the potential to significantly change the value paradigm of the network.
This trend towards a universal group think through the echo chamber of likes , tweets and mnemonic personalization has the potential to significantly “dumb down” the activity and the variety of ideas and information spread across the network. Once everybody starts filtering their journey across the chaos in the same way (i.e. Following the likes and the tweets) then who knows this trend may well provide the catalyst that cools the random activity of the network and coalesces the frenetic blipnets into the high value hub and spoke networks of the traditional mass media.
Having said all this the application of Metcalfe’s Law to the issue of the So.Me valuations is probably fundamentally flawed. After all the internet isn’t a network of people. It is a network of databases. People connect to these databases either as traffic or customers.
If we restrict our application of Metcalfe’s Law to just the databases then we soon discover that the law is valid.
The more databases you add to the internet the more valuable the internet becomes right? The more information you store in the database the more valuable the database right?
This is the fundamental basis of web economics. Everything else may be in flux and increasingly difficult to measure but the databases are in reality probably the only truly fixed points in this chaotic landscape. That’s probably why success on the web appears to be more about being great at curation rather than creation. (Think Google).
The creation happens in the chaos and the databases curate the results.
In today’s web economy it appears that the curators get paid while creators do it for the thrill of being there.
This suggests things will only begin to change for the creators when the role of the database transitions from one of curation to creation.
Will we ever see a day when the databases become part of the chaos rather than just simply recording it? Will we see a world of blipbases moving chaotically through a soup of blipnets?
To a limited extent the advent of web services is a precursor to this transition. While at the corporate level the explosion in email managed spreadsheet pyramids over the past 20 years provides some insight into how users would exploit these blipbases to solve ad-hoc problems.
To assume that the individual databases across the network are capable of evolving into blipbases is probably a step to far conceptually for now but if we imagine the internet as a unified global database. A database singularity if you like. Then we can see how a chaotic world of blipbases isn’t very far away.
So what happens when the internet can be reshaped in the same way the musicians use synthesisers to create dance tracks or like clay in the hands of an artist by anyone who chooses to create their own blipbase?
Exciting things happen because when the data is released from the mundane constraints of curation and analytics it becomes a flexible material that can be reworked and reshaped by creative minds without having to have a degree in mathematics or computer science.
We will have made the transition from the “stone age” of ubiquitous information curation to a future of unbiquitous information creation.
August 16th, 2011 → 11:07 pm
[...] material sooner. Particularly in light of the recent study of Metcalfe’s Law (see The roadmap from Metcalfe Law to Chaos Theory) and the much earlier posts on How yesterday’s news became just tables in a database and the [...]
January 14th, 2012 → 5:35 am
[...] that in mind I thought I would update the roadmap from Metcalfe Law to Chaos Theory with a few of the new ideas we have been exploring in more recent times. e.g. Thinking about [...]