So, after a month of idleness, it seems high time to report back to the Web. I’m hoping that Keith Jarrett and an amaretto stone sour are up to the task of making me feel creative tonight!
If my limited view of the bigger picture is any measure of the times, then we’re at the prolonged beginning of the Web becoming the pervasive ambient sound of government and society, war and peace. Of course, the Web is nothing new at this point, but has until recently remained a space monopolized, for the most part, by institutional and corporate interests — many of which are now the catalysts for, but not the driving forces behind, the social Web. More and more, the breeding ground of next-generation commerce is also becoming the conversation space of civil society, and despite the noisy and impolitic results of billions of voices being afforded billions of pulpits, enough sense emerges from the conversation to show that something radically disruptive is gaining strength.
And that might not be such a bad thing. Currently, various circles in and around governments are coming to terms with the challenges associated with making the people’s state sufficiently transparent in the digital age, public outreach efforts are taking to social networking sites en masse, and “to blog” is just another verb. Philosophically, I’m inclined to cheer on any effort aimed at dismantling any barrier, so here’s to everyone cracking open the halls of government for the rest of us. Cheers.
The issue that remains to be adequately addressed, and that I am afraid might be getting neglected these days in the rush towards the Web, is that of the architectures of information that underlie our day to day browsing experiences. Now, I love my social networks, and I could not begin to quantify the valuable moments that the social Web has offered — strictly personal, tangentially professional, or directly related to work. Taking government communications, relationships among official personnel and their friends and family, or public affairs coverage to commercially hosted services strikes me as an altogether different matter. If the ‘mission’ is to get the message out, then any medium will do, but when the medium is inherently multilateral then being enamored with the latest and greatest of the Web is not sufficient reason to rush out and create a Twitter account (and don’t we all love Twitter…!), tempting as it may be.
If the mission is to make the amorphous enterprise more effective as a whole, both internally and externally, further thought must be given to the medium. I’ve written previously about the need to embrace the challenges of moving horizontally, that emergence must take precedence over design. Eventually, when (or if?) centralized services can no longer scale, or system designs fall short of real-world requirements, the question must be asked, “What was untenable, the centralized tool or the distributed community?” Assuming the obvious answer, decentralization of the information architecture will have to accompany the decentralization of people, resulting in a socio-technical constitution more familiar to ecologists than engineers. What remains to be seen is how traditional hierarchies, facing such disruption and reorganization even within their own walls, will stay relevant. Workers at the coal face of geopolitics are sufficiently self-aware to know when to stand firm and when to adapt, but what about the more viscous layers of bureaucracy?
Right on. I’m not even sure I like Twitter, honestly…who cares what some bureaucrat thinks while he’s in a meeting? I think some of the fascination with the medium will fade away and what will be left is a bit more realism. I’m hoping, anyhow. The web and war are now inextricably linked, for better or for worse, with the DoD’s classified system sometimes being the divide between the have’s and the have nots even within DoD!
Indeed, the lessons that must be learned from the Web are much less about the medium, as you say. Our focus ought to be on how the Web has shown that individuals armed with little more than their own initiative can discover niches of relevant information and participate in the actual generation of new knowledge. The hyperconnectivity of the Web, and implied by the net-centric concept, does not lend itself to reductionism, since the complexity of the information space is, in fact, the “essence” of the thing. I think…