The law of 'spontaneous order'
By Declan McCullagh
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
November 14, 2005 4:00 AM PT
Do technologies like collaborative Web sites, methods of "tagging" photos and documents, and mapping-related projects really represent the next Internet revolution?
That's the buzz. Web bookmarks manager Delicious has received a round of funding from Amazon.com and others; the Web 2.0 conference last month in San Francisco was sold out; video-sharing companies YouTube and Revver also have landed financing. Skype's $2.6 billion price tag deserves a mention too.
In an eerie echo of the 1990s boom, Wired magazine is touting the world-shaking consequences of the Internet today. Compared with the average Google user, writer Kevin Kelly concludes, "I doubt angels have a better view of humanity."
It's true that these developments are useful, even fascinating. But I've been using the Internet since 1988, making me probably just enough of an old-timer to say we should view them through the wide-angle lens of history.
So to put this ostensibly new-world order in the proper perspective, it helps to recall the historic computing breakthroughs that made the modern Internet possible. Even if today's technologies do usher in a new digital society, they may simply represent the culmination of many advances that have long been in existence but are finally coming together by serendipity if not design--an example of what late Austrian economist F.A. Hayek called "spontaneous order."
It wasn't too long ago, for instance, that researchers at the University of Minnesota invented a novel way to catalog and retrieve information on the Internet.
Instead of adopting the free-form approach of the Web, Paul Lindner and Mark McCahill wanted a well-structured hierarchy for pages. Their resulting text-based approach proved to be simple for users and programmers to understand, perfect for devices with tiny screens, and a boon for the visually impaired.
The year, of course, was 1991 and that invention was called Gopher. It soon became as widespread as its eponymous namesake, thanks to volunteers who built search engines around it (one was named Veronica), contributed technical tweaks, and offered server space at no cost. Some Gopher aficionados believe that the protocol would have triumphed over the World Wide Web had the University of Minnesota not started to demand licensing fees.
The venerable Usenet was an even more revolutionary development at the time. Conceived by Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis in 1979, it began as a project to let people at different Internet sites chat with one another by exchanging public messages.
Design: Michelle White
Production: Mike Markovich, Andrew Lottmann
