Why The Web Is Like A Rain Forest

The latest issue of Discover on the stands is their 25th anniversary issue, and so for my column this month my wonderful editor Dave Grogan asked me to do a kind of "state of the internet" piece. I decided to take a look at the premise of Web 2.0 that has been tossed around a lot over the last few years, without getting too bogged down in the details (i.e., what's the difference between Web 2.0 and the semantic web?) For most readers here, I suspect that the example scenario I give will be old news, but the more interesting stuff comes at the end. I think this is a useful way to talk about what's happening online right now, whatever you want to call it.

The difference between this Web 2.0 model and the previous one is directly equivalent to the difference between a rain forest and a desert. One of the primary reasons we value tropical rain forests is because they waste so little of the energy supplied by the sun while running massive nutrient cycles. Most of the solar energy that saturates desert environments gets lost, assimilated by the few plants that can survive in such a hostile climate. Those plants pass on enough energy to sustain a limited number of insects, which in turn supply food for the occasional reptile or bird, all of which ultimately feed the bacteria. But most of the energy is lost.

A rain forest, on the other hand, is such an efficient system for using energy because there are so many organisms exploiting every tiny niche of the nutrient cycle. We value the diversity of the ecosystem not just as a quaint case of biological multiculturalism but because the system itself does a brilliant job of capturing the energy that flows through it. Efficiency is one of the reasons that clearing rain forests is shortsighted: The nutrient cycles in rain forest ecosystems are so tight that the soil is usually very poor for farming. All the available energy has been captured on the way down to the earth.

Think of information as the energy of the Web's ecosystem. Those Web 1.0 pages with their crude hyperlinks are like the sun's rays falling on a desert. A few stragglers are lucky enough to stumble across them, and thus some of that information might get reused if one then decides to e-mail the URL to a friend or to quote from it on another page. But most of the information goes to waste. In the Web 2.0 model, we have thousands of services scrutinizing each new piece of information online, grabbing interesting bits, remixing them in new ways, and passing them along to other services. Each new addition to the mix can be exploited in countless new ways, both by human bloggers and by the software programs that track changes in the overall state of the Web. Information in this new model is analyzed, repackaged, digested, and passed on down to the next link in the chain. It flows.

Comments

[Rikard Linde]

Nice piece Steven. The rain forest metaphor fits the web very well and I agree with you that wasting or preserving energy is central to the future of the web.
As far as I can tell the greatest web waste right now is caused by ownership. It's not necessarily wrong to hold on to your information but every extra effort requires energy and dealing with ownership is an effort. Therefore I think the open parts of the web will evolve much quicker and smoother than the rest of the web. Cheers

[Lou Gold]

Yes, I like the metaphor even though the ecological understanding is weak.

By focusing of efficiency, sustainability is missed. This is a very common error in modern techno-industrial thought. For example, an industrial forester views dead and dying old trees as "decadent" and fallen logs as "waste." But this is the reservoir upon which future generations depend.

A tropical rainforest stresses efficiency to the point where there is almost no nutrient accumulation in the soil. Thus, when destroyed through deforestation and grazing, it rarely returns to vitality. It's sort of a bubble and burst (boom and bust) situation.

On the other hand, a temperate rainforest creates a great nutrient reservoir in the soil and a sink of sequestered carbon in the trunks of trees. The result is high resiliency and sustainability. Even when hit by catastrophic forces such as fire or clearcut logging it is likely to return, whereas its tropical relative is not.

From a standpoint of digital ecology you would want to build in an understanding of sustainability. So it would good to ask where the vitality and resilency are stored in a web-related way.

PS: I'm not a geek so I can't answer the question I have posed. Just offering some thoughts from an ecological perspective.

[redhairann]

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Thanks

Ann in Shanghai.China.

[Lou Gold]

For Brian:

I understand that it's a metaphor to aid in "grasping" new developments. No linear
comparison was intended. I also contributed an eco-based metaphor of "bloom and burst" which may
possibly help one grasp some of the "balloons" that develop around new technologies. I dunno for sure, just contributing what I thought might a useful metaphor. In any event, I hoped to raise a concern for sustainability (in a digital ecology) on par with the interest in improved efficiency.

BTW, I followed the link and read Steven's full article which I liked VERY much.

Best regards.

[reed]

I find the whole Web 2.0 thing to be weird. How can we decide what the future technology will be like ahead of time? We can only try to invent it of course.

Anyway, one thing that's still missing from the Web, and might always be missing unless we see some small yet important changes to HTML and/or HTTP. This missing thing is real transclusion ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion ).

Until something we could charactarize as transclusion exists in the fundamental techlonogies (HTML and maybe HTTP too; or, something new entirely), there will be a billion ways of sharing and reconfiguring data, and it will be very difficult to do so in any really scalable and long lasting way.

(Incidentally, another Xanadu concept we are still lacking is permanent data storage, but this is a truly sticky problem if you want to avoid the one-company-controll-it-all model of Xanadu.)

[reed]

Lou Gold wrote: "From a standpoint of digital ecology you would want to build in an understanding of sustainability. So it would good to ask where the vitality and resilency are stored in a web-related way."

I think the natural extension of your forest and ground soil example into the web is something like the Internet Archive or Google's cache that seeks to preserve information that would otherwise be lost forever.

[reed]

A local solution would be web server software that does revision control on every document, and which seperates the web document configuration from its underlying data source (whether the filesystem or CGI queries).

[Rikard Linde]

Reed, I think you're quite right about transclusion but I also think the main problem is ownership, not technology. The reason we're not using frames, or php includes or the like is that companies will sue us if we do.
Remember the news services from 95 and 96 when you had a navigation list on the left with links to NY Times, CNN, BBC etcetera and a frame on the right showing the content from those sites. The interface sucked but it was transclusion. And those services were quickly lawyered to death.

[Brian1625]

It's a metaphor to help us "grasp" the abstract. Not a literal linear comparision....