http://jwsr.ucr.edu/archive/vol6/number3/pdf/jwsr-v6n3-pr...
Rated • 1 review • internet, stumbleupon, networks, theory • ucr.edu
For the Russian-born Belgium scientist and theorist Ilya Prigogine, the rise of the internet and networked societies in the past few decades has destroyed 'the classical deterministic view of nature'. The freedom and self-organization that occurs in online communities has supposedly crippled the capacity of any single group to predict and control the movement of humans and nature. Yet to hold true to scientific values, Prigogine must mean only that the capacity to classically determine such a movement has been destroyed: the old means of understanding nature must change in the face of a revolutionary situation. In knowledge, theory and practice, the old borders of nations in sovereignty, cultures, communities, space and knowledge are breaking down in a global swarm.
Theorists such as Prigogine favor analogies to explain the Internet, and they draw them from the lives of insects:
In small colonies the complexity is localized at the individual, while in large ones complexity is more on the level on the interactions between the individuals. It is certainly not coincidental that in the largest and most integrated colonies--that is, in the army ants and termites--the individuals are practically blind. The networked ant societies are capable of extraordinary performances. In recent years, super colonies of ants, which contain hundreds of millions of individuals, have been discovered. These large colonies develop a network of communication between individual nests on tenths of kilometers--millions of times the size of a single ant.
When scrutinized, this is hardly the optimistic vision of the Internet we might expect. The destruction of classical determinations enables 'extraordinary performances', although beyond gathering and amassing we cannot say for what end. We are come to the future: 'the blindness of individuals' in the army of ants, termites and bytes. Where a super colony may connect many different nests, it would seem that it is only in small, nestling colonies that complexity belongs with individuals. Surely our own StumbleUpon is one of these super colonies. SU confirms the blindness of individuals, the generic complexity of the whole group and the individual complexity of small groups.
Yet Prigogine and many theorists of networked societies fail to point out that small groups continue to find ways, in a networked society, to interfere, control and determine the nature of the larger group. Such small groups have certainly long given up the classical deterministic view of nature: they've replaced it with a Machiavellian view; for them control does not need to be proved by a theory. If 'the mediate, without traces, becomes evanescent', to quote the poet, so too can the embedded mediation of the online communities - i.e. the systemic agents, engineers and controllers who work behind the scenes or the marketers and observers who make money out of the mere quantity of extraordinary performances. Just take a look at what's happening with Twitter.
Regardless of my problems with some of Prigogine's assumptions, I think that his three general questions are some of the central ones:
(1) Who will benefit from the networked society? Will it lower the wealth gap between nations?
(2) What will be the effect of the networked society on individual creativity?
(3) A recent pool has shown that, for the large majority of people, the hope of the third millennium is for greater harmony between man and nature and amongst humans. How will the networked society affect this harmony? For me, these are not only abstract questions, but also guidelines for reflection and action.
