From linking to thinking

How we’ll live when information surrounds us

The Web, and how we use it, has changed dramatically over the past few years. We’ve seen an explosive growth in social networking, more types and volumes of content becoming available, a wider availability and sophistication of creative tools and the growing use of mobile devices to access the Internet. Taken individually, each of these changes represents a major shift in how we learn and communicate. Together, these trends signal a shift to a future where the Web is at the center of our information lives.

What does that mean for us as learners, educators, citizens and creators? How will our lives be changed when we don’t connect to information on a case-by-case basis, but live in an environment saturated with data, media and communications?

OCLC invited David Weinberger—technologist and author of Everything is Miscellaneous and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto—and Nova Spivack—Semantic Web pioneer, co-founder of EarthWeb, Radar Networks and the San Francisco Web Innovators Network (SFWIN)—to share a conversation at its symposium at ALA Midwinter on the topic, “From Linking to Thinking: How We’ll Live When Information Surrounds Us.” Prior to the symposium, we asked them for their thoughts on several related questions. Their dialogue touches on several key concepts related to the future of the Web and how we’ll share information and ideas.

NextSpace: If Web 1.0 could be called, “stuff on the Web,” and Web 2.0, “people on the Web,” what is Web 3.0?

Nova Spivack

Nova: I think these labels are best defined as decades of the Web. So Web 1.0 was the first decade, 1990–2000, and so on. The focus of each of these decades has been different, but there seem to be some large-scale patterns at work. I’ve done some thinking about these patterns and I think they may help us to project the future. At least the near future.

I think Web 1.0 was actually focused on making nodes (pages and sites) on the Web. 2.0 has been more focused on making links between the nodes: content networks, social networks, tags, widgets, APIs, recommendations, etc. 3.0 will be about making sense of the Web by describing everything on it with semantic metadata, by organizing it in new ways, learning about it, reviewing it, rating it, filtering it, personalizing it, etc. 4.0 will be reasoning on the Web. For example, agents that can do things for you, sites that can self-organize and self-optimize to how they are used, services that can intelligently interact with other services, networks and Webs of knowledge and people that learn and even generate new information intelligently, and organizations that evolve their own meta-level intelligences that begin to help to facilitate collective behaviors.  

David Weinberger

David: I think that’s one fair way of telling the story, but it also hides other ways of telling (as all stories do). I would emphasize the continuities: we connected nodes in 1.0 because we were connecting with one another and putting ideas together, as per 2.0. And, as I’m sure Nova agrees, we are already doing some 4.0 things on the Web, albeit not as well as we will.

NextSpace: How much of what is happening now around Web 2.0 is “hype” vs. how much of it is actually providing value?

Nova: Much of Web 2.0 was really not that new. The seeds of AJAX were built  in 1.0. Social networking started in 1.0. It has largely been a decade that has focused on the applications and best practices of what was developed in the previous decade. However, what is new perhaps is the widespread understanding of the wisdom of crowds and the power of social networks that has come about. In this decade we all became very aware of the social dimension of the Web. The Web evolved from merely a publishing medium to a communication medium. For many of us—for example bloggers, avid users of social networks, and members of online communities—the Web became more central to our communication than previous era communication tools like e-mail.   

David: Again, the continuities. I don’t think the Web started out as a publishing medium but as a connective medium. It was social from the day it escaped Tim Berners-Lee’s lab.

NextSpace: What disappoints you most about the current state of the Web?

Nova:  I’m not disappointed. I think the Web is developing and evolving quite well. The biggest threat to the Web’s evolution are groups that seek to legislate or control the Web on a national level. The Web is a global medium.

David: Amen and high five!

NextSpace: What one thing do you see as the “killer app” of the next “phase” of the Web?

Nova: For most consumers it will probably surface as better search; faceted search across the entire Web, including all the structured data on the Web. I think connecting location awareness with the Web will be big as well. Attaching sites to locations in the physical world. The Internet of Things is similarly important—attaching sites to physical objects. The Semantic Web itself attaches sites to concepts—it’s the highest level of abstraction. Everything on the Web is linked to networks of concepts. The concepts themselves are also defined on the Web. The Web becomes a vast network of concepts.

David: I was in agreement until the Semantic Web point. Nova and I may have a pretty substantial disagreement about the value and possibility of knowledge representation, which may be founded in a difference over how we think humans make sense of their world. I think we can do a lot better in providing concept maps and ontologies but not get anywhere near a full representation.

Nova: Concepts are much more granular than pages. They are infinitely granular. In other words the resolution of the Web becomes effectively infinite. Today the resolution is limited to sites and pages of content. URLs are basically used to reference these rather “large” chunks of services and information.

David: Yup. But again the continuity. Does being repetitive constitute having a theme? XML and the modernization of HTML have made it possible and relatively easy to identify chunks of pages. Applications that use that chunked data already have schema. Those schema are not interoperable without difficulty, and the Semantic Web is a big step up in that regard. The problem is that concepts themselves are not fully interoperable.

Nova: With the Semantic Web, URI’s can and probably will, be applied to everything, no matter how small – even individual fields within data records. And they will be used to represent abstract ideas, physical places, physical things, living and dead and imaginary people, organizations, processes and events, and much more.

NextSpace: Linking is a key activity on the Web now, powering everything from major search engines to social recommendations. Will there be a different activity that drives Web 3.0 in the same way?

Nova: Yes. I think we will see a big shift towards sensemaking. Adding useful context to documents. Making more useful links. Filtering out the things that are not useful to the present context or intent. Organizing the Web. Personalizing and filtering the Web.

David: Yes, and this has been the story of the Web since it began.

NextSpace: What are your thoughts on “The Singularity?” How do they relate to Web 3.0?

Nova:  I don’t really believe in the Singularity. Intelligence is not merely computation. At the very least, if a Singularity ever happens, it will be significantly farther off in the future than Ray Kurzweil projects. Even if Ray is correct that the computational capacity of a single computer will surpass that of a single human brain within about 30 years, that won’t necessarily mean that computers become anywhere close to as smart as humans in that timespan. The most important thing about the brain is not the hardware, it is the software. We have absolutely no understanding of the software of the brain today. But there are certainly algorithms and other processes we don’t understand that are taking place within the brain.

David: I agree but I think that thinking of the brain as a computer takes us down the wrong path. Computers are symbol processors and only do what they do because we take high voltage as “standing for” a 1. Brains are fundamentally different. They are not hardware and software any more than a rock skipping over a pond is hardware and software. A computer programmed to simulate a rock skipping isn't a rock skipping because the program and the formal representation of the rock/pond are symbolic.

Spivack created Twine, an online, social Web service for information storage, authoring and discovery. Twine combines features of forums, wikis, online databases and newsgroups and employs intelligent software to automatically mine and store data.

Nova: Human brains think in certain ways and this is true across the population. We  learn in certain ways. Our minds are structured in certain ways. And we as a  species have almost no understanding of any of this. It certainly won't be  possible to make computers that are nearly as sophisticated or complex as  human minds, without being able to embody them with software that is similar  that of the human brain. And we are nowhere close to making such software.

We have no idea how to do it or even what it would do. Beyond that—even if  we could make such software and we could load it into future supercomputers—the resulting systems still would not be truly self-aware or conscious and  would therefore still not be as intelligent, creative or spontaneous as  humans. There are at least a few thousand years of future innovation  required before we can as a species overcome these barriers. In the end we  will discover that the best way to make intelligent systems is through  biology and physics. We will begin to engineer our bodies, devices, and the  cosmos at a very deep level. But we’re not there yet.

NextSpace: What one prediction would you like to make that seems, on the surface, the most “out there”?

Nova:  I just made it. OK, I’ll give you a bonus answer.Within 100 years we will connect enough of the world to the Web, with enough metadata describing it, that software will be able to reason about the world, based on what it sees happening on the Web, in realtime. In other words, the Web becomes a real-time model or approximation of the world. A formal representation of the world. That doesn’t exist anywhere other than within each of our own minds right now.

David: This is the difference I alluded to above in how Nova and I think humans think about their world. I don’t think we have a mental model of the world. I think we live in the world. I’m an embodiment sort of guy. My background is in phenomenology, if that’s any help in understanding why I go wrong in this particular way. Again, though, I agree with Nova so long as we keep it continuous: The more metadata and systems of metadata, the smarter the Web.

Nova: We are each only able to think about our own perspectives and experiences. By forming a common—shared—representation we will be able to think collectively about the combined perspective and experience of humanity. Not only that, but our software will begin to help us do that. The Web will start thinking about the world, and about us, and helping us to think about these topics as well. The Web will begin to not only reflect the world, but it may begin to guide it or reorganize it, or make predictions about it. Something that happens in the physical world will trigger signals on the Web that will travel through networks and trigger other signals, resulting in content and actions that travel back through the networks of the Web, down to people and devices which then take further actions. It’s a full stimulus-response cycle—a cybernetic circuit, a learning machine. The Web literally is becoming the nervous system of the planet, and like any nervous system, it doesn’t merely take input, it generates output. This is truly as if our species is evolving to a new level of collective intelligence.

A philosopher by training, Weinberger's books focus on how the Internet is changing human relationships, communication and society.

David: I hope Nova is OK about taking out the “literally.” If not, then we can just wait a few hundred years to see who’s right. What Nova describes is, of course, already happening, especially if we use “Web” loosely, as I tend to, so that it includes the Net, etc. The world is getting sensored. That will definitely continue. In fact, I think we’ve already evolved by incorporating the Web. Google has added 15 IQ points to the species.

When I look ahead, I do see a rise in metadata and a consequent rise in interoperable and “intelligent” apps. Yay. I love metadata. Truly. But I tend to be more excited about the rise in human connectedness. The mediation by machine is crucial both in shaping the nature of the connectedness and in how it inevitably limits that relationship, but for me the mere fact that more and more humans are able to touch one another, in conversation and through their works, is what’s truly transformative. The meaning we generate will always outpace our attempts to manage, represent and systematize it.

NetLibray launches new media center | By the numbers