From Cave Paintings to Google Searching the Internet

Since cave paintings began, humans have exhibited this unique desire to connect with each other and share ideas. This is perhaps one thing above all else that sets us apart from the beasts, and I often wonder if the Internet simply provides an ultra evolved extension of this same pass time. It was a recent post by my friend Michael Wharton about The Church of Google that had me thinking :- If humanities knowledge is a computer system, then Google, Social Networking and the Internet might be better described as the heuristic, control bus or selection process, responsible for connecting, sharing and interbreeding the appropriate ideas between people.  Interestingly, Google are against proposition 8, which is nice to know.

Google as God?

Just as creatures evolve, I like to think that ideas evolve too and – likewise – the means we use to express these ideas must grow to facilitate this expansion. Realising that caves make a pretty lousy means of broadcasting, the humans invent paper which turned out to be much more portable and allowed these ideas to travel more freely. Then came radio and television which would quickly come to decide wars and inform the public about the world at large. The Internet is different in one important aspect – that we get some choice over our intellectual diet.

Could Google be thought of as God? I certainly don’t think this idea is as crazy as it must sound, given the inherent importance of language and communication to all human civilisations. Nothing changes the fact that Google is a collection of distributed computers that run code and have access to a massive database. It is a working masterpiece of form and function, but is certainly not a deity in the classical sense.  But – perhaps like evolution – this is because our beliefs were wrong.

Google – Catalyst of the Human Condition

Nara is one of my all time favourite Japanese cities, packed full with national treasures and ancient temples. Like many throughout Southeast Asia, Tōdaiji (東大寺) temple in Nara has Kongorikishi (金剛力士) or Niō (仁王) at the gates. These are two guardians, the left is known as Naraen Kongō (那羅延金剛) and has it’s mouth in an “a” position (Agyō 阿形), symbolising the birth of all things. (Like our Alphabet, the Japanese consider ‘a’ to be the first letter of the alphabet). The right one is known as Misshaku Kongō (密迹金剛) having it’s mouth in an n or m position (last letter of the alphabet), known as Ungyō (吽形) – symbolising the death of all things. Amazingly, a similar analogy exists for life and death in Christian civilisation with Alpha (A) and Omega (Ω) – the first and last letters of the classical Greek alphabet (Book of Revelation verses 1:8, 21:6, and 22:13) :

Revelation verses 1:8
“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is, and who was, and who is to come…
Revelation verses 21:6
…“I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End”…

But why is language so important that many cultures measure their very existence against it? Language shapes our beliefs about the world, and affects our behaviour. It is used to document our journey of self discovery and what is left behind after we are gone will form pieces of a jigsaw that will ultimately come to define us.

The truth is, when it comes to subjects like birth and death, we develop all kinds of elaborate beliefs in an attempt to find meaning for something which is only temporary.  It predisposes us to fixate on where we came from – how we got here, and where we are going.  We become search.  From a young age we learn to start asking questions.  Google aims to match you up with someone who (it believes) has the answers.  Ideas that would have been limited by geographical borders, by culture or by language can now be almost totally free.

I suppose I would see Google as a catalyst of the human condition.  Whatever our creators intended for us, whatever purpose our lives serve, or whatever it is that separates us from the animals … Google and the Internet help us do it better!

Evolution and Conflict of Ideas

I recall with fondness buying my first 14.4Kbps modem in the early 90’s and using my fathers Compuserve account to run up massive bills speaking to random strangers from across the globe in chat rooms. What a neat experience! But the Internet was not free as it is today – and a user could easily run up a bill for several hundred pounds in one month of ‘excessive’ usage.

And the highway toll isn’t the only thing that’s changed in this time. Looking back, it’s hard to ignore the evolutionary processes these ideas have undergone :- PHP gets bigger and more powerful, get itself all object orientated and has an AJAX affair with Javascript, content and design get divorced, (although design still gets CSS visitation rights to HTML on weekends, though this is generally frowned upon by the public who would prefer CSS stay at least 1 document away from HTML at all times!) Websites become blogs, search engines become marketing opportunities, social networking becomes the norm and tutorial sites become Wiki. Then humans start using these phrases like ‘Web 2.0‘ to describe the new and emerging landscape. Not only a collection of concepts about user experience, participation and user-generated content, but an associated appearance and design that somehow reflects these beliefs – akin to religious art and iconography woven into the architecture. Like, religion, there will be believers and non-believers – those who accept the program and those who don’t.

Web 2.0 – The Religious Doctrine, Ideal and Direction

Tim Berners-Lee, credited inventor of the Internet, said in an interview with Developer Works (22 Aug 2006):

Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is, of course, a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.

Perhaps he is not wrong about the underlying, objective, but does Web 2.0 not express the WAY in which we connect to each other? I don’t think anyone has suggested the Web 1.0 was not about connections – but rather – Web 2.0 expresses the trends in the way in which those connections are continuously evolving.

Perhaps Web 2.0 is just a fancy word. Perhaps it is not real, in the same way that magnetic north is not real – simply our arbitrary labelling of a phenomenon resulting from the Earths’ natural magnetic field. But by employing this arbitrary label, we can make use of this phenomenon – devising maps, describing directions and positions which can be communicated in accurate detail to others. Even though ‘magnetic north’ itself is just an arbitrary label we have created from thin air.

Web 2.0 – Like Evolutions Direction On A Compass

And at the risk of becoming as woolly as the concept itself – perhaps Web 2.0 is best thought of in this way – as the evolutionary direction of the ideas on the Internet. It is about improvements in the methods we employ to help the Internet do what it does best – allowing ideas to be free to mingle, to fight, of views to be shared. As this happens, ideas naturally evolve in the same way that species evolve, the more successful elements of the fittest living on in future generations.

The other day I was reading Google News while logged into my Google account, and realised that every single article was tailored to suit me – updates on something I had read about previously – or had written about in my blog. Now that Google also tailors search results and my experience on the web, I find myself wondering how far this will go. What political event will slip under my radar, because Google knows I have never previously expressed an interest? To what extent will my experience of reality start becoming unique to myself?  I coudn’t help thinking it was both strange and ironic that the desire to reach out and connect with others, has now given rise to the choice of personalising that experience in some cases.

As our society appears to be crumbling around us, I can’t help feeling as though the Internet is the way forward.  It helps catalyse a process of idea sharing that has been around since we began to make noises and drawing on cave walls.