The Network is the Computer
In 1984, John Gage, from Sun Microsystems, coined the phrase "The Network is the Computer" to describe the emerging world of distributed computing. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gage) This was only three years after the stand-alone, non-networked PC had been introduced to the workplace, and most people dismissed John’s idea. They couldn’t comprehend what he was talking about. To them the computer was the new beige 386 computer sitting on their desk running Windows.
Now, over twenty years later, we are starting to understand what these five words really mean.
A few years ago Tim O’Reilly the O’Reilly book publisher coined the term Web 2.0. Below is a memory map created during the first FOO camp describing this "new" approach to the Web that reflects John Gage’s statement from 1984. (The FOO Camps are invitation only, no plan, tents on the lawn, geek fest to help O’Reilly find out what’s on the radar. The name comes from the common use of the word "foo" and "bar" traditionally used by programmers to designate an example variable name.)
Figure 2 – "meme map" of Web 2.0 that was developed at a brainstorming session during FOO Camp, a conference at O’Reilly Media
(http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html#mememap)
Web 2.0 utilizes AJAX making the difference between client and server virtually transparent. Instead of the old-fashioned click-and-wait as the client requested a web page from the server, mouse moves and clicks give immediate results and making the user think that everything is happening on his or her computer. (Google maps was the break through application of this type allowing people to "dragging" the map to see a new view instead of clicking on it and waiting for a new view to arrive from the server.)
Web 2.0 applications such as You Tube, MySpace, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, and Flickr encourage sharing and collaboration of all types of content. The user becomes king of the content. Instead of being fed pages, users create the content of a site. Instead of simply running programs or viewing web pages people are participating in a collective intelligence.
Instead of reading static pages we are interacting with each other on a global basis. Communications with people around the world are possible through IM (Instant Messaging), emails, postings, and web discussions. Instead of a private list of favorites you can now create a public list of annotated favorites with de.licio.us. Suddenly, a list of bookmarks becomes a fine-tuned search engine showing the best pages by keyword saved, shared, and annotated by everyone in the deli.cio.us world.
Instead of a Word document held captive by your word processor, you can now write collaborative documents on line using Google Documents & Spreadsheets. For example, I use Google Docs for committee meetings giving everyone the chance to add to the agenda as well as to view minutes and efficiently create collaborative documents instead of clumsy email attachments.
In the last module of my Web III (XML) course I discuss the phenomenon of emergence, a part of System Theory. Emergence demonstrates how complicated systems can be created from a series of relatively simple interactions. Examples include ant colonies that change personalities over a thirty-year period even though none of the individual ants live more than a year and there is no central leader ant (the queen’s only purpose is to lay eggs, she does not direct the colony). Or slime mold made of millions of individual spores. This mold forms when conditions are conducive and can "crawl" through a maze to find food, yet none of the spores has any brains and none of the cells act as a leader or catalyst. (These and many other examples are highlighted in an excellent book named Emergence by Steven Johnson.)
Our networked world and the Web in particular demonstrates the concept of emergence. Millions of connections are making a new, emergent entity. We are no longer simply interacting with the computer sitting on our lap. Now we are responding to the Web itself, the result of millions of seemingly insignificant additions from people (and computers) around the globe. The Network is truly the computer just as every web page, blog entry, forum question and answer, and You Tube video (and resulting comments) makes us part of its existence. To represent this concept Dr. Mike Wesch, an anthropology professor at Kansas State University put together the video entitled: Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us. He posted it on You Tube where it became one of the most popular videos in 2007.
The network is the computer and the computer is Us.
