Web as Our Way to Understanding

Continuing the Thinking in the 21st Century series…

Great comment by Phronk on the previous think21st post [excerpt]:

Autonomy, flow, exploration, striving for material (digital) goods, relatedness, competence, they’re all represented, often in explicit numerical form. And they interact in a complex, emergent way that even the game developers can’t anticipate.

See also: Twitter.

I’ve been learning a lot more from the web than merely web-stuff — and so have you, whether you know it or not.

First, our tools, activities and surroundings literally teach us how to think. We constantly absorb metaphors and images that go on to inform our intuition and reason.

If you haven’t read it yet, take a look at Lakoff and Johnson’s landmark, Metaphors We Live By, or Steven Pinker’s more general and up-to-date book, The Stuff of Thought.*

In the past, the most dominant metaphors in civic and commercial spheres were from machines, war, and sports. Now the metaphors are becoming more organic (e.g. concepts like “streams” and “cloud computing”). As life and work gets more networked and dynamic via the web, life and work via the web also supplies the metaphors for making sense of the new structures and systems.

The one that highlights my point the best is the concept of “memes.”

Five years ago, unless you read Richard Dawkins you probably would have raised an eyebrow and walked away from anyone saying that ideas are like genes, selected and reproduced through culture. But then Digg and YouTube came along, and suddenly the idea makes intuitive sense with barely any explanation at all.

Now, not only is “meme” a mainstream concept, but people are using the concept to make more platforms and applications that work on that same principle… and then we’ll gain new metaphors an models from those… and so on.

Further, these applications are fertile ground for research by anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and other social scientists. Phronk pointed this out in his comment as well: the web generates massive amounts of hard data — and it’s already digitized for analysis and visualization.

(Unless Google and Facebook decide to keep it all to themselves.)

Beyond that, as we already know, the knowledge that may result from all that research can be more readily accessed by anybody, as it’s more easily searchable and there’s a corresponding trend towards open access journals, etc.

It isn’t just today’s research we’re gaining more access to; we’re also getting the entire history of human knowledge at our fingertips.

After all, data doesn’t tell the whole story, sometimes it prevents us from seeing the forest for the trees. Taking a step back to see what people thought and wrote about human fundamentals 100 years ago, 200 years ago, 2000 years ago (because some things will never change) can be very fruitful, in my experience.

Combine those developments with the powerful new metaphors and models the web is making for us, and I run out of words (until the web makes better ones) to describe what a freaking exciting opportunity this is to learn and create.

And there’s one more factor we can’t forget: it isn’t just the data and ideas that are connected, we’re connected.

Better ways to converse and collaborate bring the other three developments together even more richly, making the possibilities for learning literally unimaginable.

*Note: there’s already an almost-finished post about metaphors.

More From the Archives:

• 12-27-2009 -- Thinking in the 21st Century: Progress Report
• 12-22-2009 -- Collaborating Openly on 21st Century Government
• 12-18-2009 -- How to Build in the 21st Century
• 12-16-2009 -- Metaphors For Work
• 08-25-2010 -- How to Make the Web Better by Sharing Selfishly

Tagged as: collaboration, learning, metaphors, networking, research, social science, think21st, understanding