The Web, Canvas of Evolutions

Paris, April, 20th 2006

I was born just before the first babblings of Internet, am dwelling in the cyber-space since 1997 and ever since I cannot cease to be amazed at the mutations in our ways of being and thinking it provokes. It is more than a simple commonplace to say that these mutations are profoundly changing our society.

This website was certainly not the first one I created or help create.

My first one was for the 2001 edition of Gala de l’Équinoxe^[1], to promote the event alongside with traditional media (leaflets, placards etc.).

Very soon, it was followed by an early version of the website for le PI, the weekly of the École Centrale, in which I played not with static, but dynamic contents to allow the weekly paper to be not only printed, but also available to our alumni (now discontinued for privacy reasons I do not caution) and searchable.

I also got involved in putting on the rails the website for our Asian association le GEPEO, with a database of contacts.

In between, I also used my own place as a laboratory for some testing, when I felt the need to experiment with new concerns like Unicode encoding (for display of Chinese characters), Web standards, accessibility etc.

More recently, I also helped a friend initiate a French database on crime fictions (polars) in April 2005 ; the baby is alive and kicking and very promising.

I wanted this website to be different, more personal, and hopefully more mature.

It is a playing field though, but I wanted to give some concepts a go, as fully as possible. Steps have been erratic and painfully long, but the exploration was worthwhile.

This article is about some of the beacons I found on the road.

^ For a glimpse of the event

Blogs

At first, when hearing of the concept of blogs, or weblogs, I did not find any particular reason for it to dramatically change the shape of the web. Some people coined the word escribitionist, and that was what it evoked to me. One has to admit that most of the time, it is just an outlet for logorrhoea, which in itself is worthy of interest as it is a form of communication, but the craze about them around 2000 (as it began being noticed) probably meant something more.

And blogging is in fact changing and improving the web. Basically it merely did something unexpected which is re-empowering people ; they no longer needed to be tech-savvy or cyberpunk wiz to share their thoughts with nothing less than the world.

No wonder many have found it threatening, because it is a truly powerful means of communication that erodes the trenches of power. Anyhow, the evolution is already there, and people had to cope with it.

An significant example is when Google had to change its web-ranking system, because, via their cross-referencing, bloggers’ voices became to be heard on top of classical information channels. Traditional medias / governments temporarily lost their grip on the truths to be told.

Hopefully now, even political candidates are learning to use it, as they have been told by their campaign departments of the immense potential lying here.

I doubt most of them truly understand how it is supposed to be useful to them, but the result is that it reacquaints people with political life, as they feel less cut-off from their governments… So the benefit may also be for the political class itself, even if not in the way they expected beforehand.

So blogs were a thing I had in mind all along. In fact, while creating this website, I had to ask myself the question : how would it be different from a verbose blog, or a simple gallery… I wanted to avoid the pitfall of the blog structure, which in the worst case resemble a heap of unrelated things where an occasional reader can be lost.

Wikis

Then we come to wikis. Another unlikely move against the deeply engrained belief (or paradigm) that something open is necessarily weak.

Wiki, as the legend now goes, is said to come from wiki wiki, Hawaiian for quick. It began circa 1995, around the same time that blogs emerged. The idea behind was that we can propose a framework for a website that is changing with every input from the readers. How bizarre !

I firstly thought that the project of a encyclopaedia built that way would not overcome the noise generated by ignorant or ill-intended people.

I was wrong. Wikipedia (and many now similar projects) is a success story ; of course there are in-built protections to limit vandalism, but the butterfly effect is key in the exponential growth. In that, the project has been supported by a great software, simple to use and learn, unburdening people of the hassling onus of technology. Once more.

The first marvellous thing about wikis is that they are swiftly updated. I use one for personal purpose, and I find it like Albus Dumbledore’s pensive, a vessel to receive ideas, stubs and seeds of the mind that just need the proper time to be expanded, pruned, and connected to other seemingly unrelated matters.

The reason behind is the second thing I find ingenious in it. Framework does not mean an implied structure.

We live in the era of chaos. But chaos has been misunderstood ; Chaos Χάος is in Greek mythology the primal and ultimate potential, still without form, but ready to expand and beget many children. In Greek, it did not meant disorder before people started to impart their beliefs on a misread idea.

In fact, we have begun to rediscover in mathematics a underlying sense of order in so-called chaotic events, like strange attractors, fractals etc. People failing to see that elusive sense of order are akin to people who believe (to use Ken Wilber’s words) in the oops theory. Things are never as erratic as they seem, as long as you get the proper perspective.

That is why I find Wikimedia so great, because it allows us a peek beyond the constraints of technology. We are living now a clear shift from hierarchical, patriarchal structures like the folder/sub-folder structure imposed by most of computers operating systems, to a category-driven, feminine structure of relationships. And we do not speak only of computers.

The imminent Windows Vista is reflecting the trend as well. Windows’ new file system (WinFS, for Windows Future Storage) will use a relational database to make searching and using files more intuitive. And that idea has been in store for at least 20 years (IBM patents) !

Limitations

Of course, there are important limitations to the wikis, because of the relative anonymity of the contributions which are restlessly reshaped by everyone.

The main issues are that

information may be incidentally or deceivingly false
controversial subjects may be stranded because of internal dissent

But the good point in this debate is that it raises these issues, especially in high-explosive times where we see great radicalizations of movements because of mere provocation or misunderstanding.

Basically it all relates to the simple questions : what do I consider a truth ? What kind of absolute is it for me ? What is the difference between a truth and a preference ?…
Finally, even if wikis are fantastic tools, on a aesthetic point of view, one has to admit the mediawiki software is bland. Compared to the extreme diversity and inventiveness of blogs, it is rather poor, and very uneasy to customize.

Web 2

Another ground swell in the cyber-space. This long-awaited evolution seems more tangible since the release of Google’s wonderful products.

It began almost unnoticeably, with a simple search box that completed automagically as you typed the words.

The first time I saw it, I could not get around how this thing was done. I felt as odd as a cliché native in front of some white man’s magic… So I let it go, for a moment.

Then, appeared Google Maps. And Gmail. Both of them providing an graceful easiness in end-user interaction never attained before (to my experience).

And the magic was dissected, analyzed over the web, and it is since reused more and more. It is now an emerging standard with promising potentials to give back the web to the users. Not to say Google invented it, which is not the case, but it realized some of its latent potential.

The fantastic thing about that, is that the technology has been present almost all the way long. The purpose here is not to get into details of AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML), but suffice to say that it allows a webpage to be updated (via an asynchronous download) without having to reload the entire page.

Another great example of increased interaction are the editors such as TinyMCE or FCKeditor, bringing the feeling of a word processor inside your website, without (too much) interference from the browser used.

Will it lead to a delocalization of our local contents stored for now in our computers ? This is a question worth asking, as for instance with Google emails, storages capacities are now very important, and access to the data is very easy, swift and reliable from (almost) everywhere. The implications are mind-boggling, but it seems we are slowly heading for it…

Accessibility

Accessibility has become a new concern as the web evolves, that I would classify along with web standards, Unicode and design concerns.

The initial growth of the Internet was hectic, and what a long way we have come from the first plain ugly highly-contrasted websites with animated gifs, frames and the likes !

Most of it, we owe it to W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and the design of standards for the web. It induced first an annoyingly rigorous constraint over the way the code was written, quite contrary to the initial movement (simplicity of the readily useable HTML), but the payback is enormous.

It allows the wide diversity of browsers to converge on the same display of a page. I like that idea as it allows a discrete browser like Firefox with a lot of new interesting innovations to play on the same ground as Internet Explorer, and to draw upwards the others. Much like Google draws upwards the overall quality of free services (search, email etc.).

Moreover, standards never meant the end of the evolution in fixed settings. On the contrary, it sustained its growth, with things like

CSS (cascading style sheets) to beautify the content,
the global implementation of Unicode, to allow a webpage to be displayed simultaneously in all written languages (which allows Chinese in my French pages)

This recent evolution seems to be driven and limited by accessibility concerns, that is, making sure a webpage can be accessed by everyone.

As we will see, it does not truly prevents from doing things, at best, it makes things technically more difficult to realize… At worse (for a developer) it raises issues that ask for choices and/or compromises.

CAPTCHA and spamming

An example of this dilemma is CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart).

A user familiar with the Internet has surely encountered one of these beasts, deformed and barely recognizable, asking you for their names.

The goal of these images is to prevent robots to do automatically certain evil tasks, such as inundating a website of comments for personal enlargement or blue pharmaceutical adjuvant.

The thing is, robots can’t theoretically read them, but blind people’s apparatus cannot either.

So developers go exploring all the possibilities to circumvent this issue, and some of the solutions they suggest are really ingenious, like provide some alternative sound sample, or (my preferred one) provide a test to tell apart stupid people by asking them random questions.

It is well-known that robots are stupid, at least as stupid as they are programmed to be. Which means in retrospect they can be as clever as we allow them to be.

So even if we cannot right now conceive of a robot able to distinguish forms (like “tell me what animal is on the picture?”), it is perhaps only a matter of motivation and time. And most hackers do like challenges of that sort, just to prove their point.

So it forces us to rethink of what we think of security. Because, every honest IT guy shall tell you, there is no such thing as security in a system. And let us face the truth, spammers are as old as taggers’s graffiti, and certainly older than the cavemen.

Thus this is a matter of compromise if we do not want to be endlessly playing the game of the mouse and cat… One can adopt the stance of wikipedia, and count on the cohesive support of one’s users, or one can barricade every door and bar oneself from genuine contact. Between the two, one has to find the appropriate solution. The only difference now, is that one is aware of the limitations of his system, and prepared to most likely outcomes.
I read recently of yet another technique to crack down captchas, another variation of «social engineering», which is basically a way to make people crack “secured” data without their knowing. Some porn sites entice people with the promise of free images providing that they (unknowingly) help them break captchas to get free email accounts. As these websites are accountable for a great part of the spam, the cycle is close…

In the end

… it is but the beginning.

In 1995, Ken Wilber in his Brief History of Everything expressed doubts about the emergence of a new global conscience thanks to the Internet. His doubts are founded, because the reality of Internet is nothing entirely rosy. Still, there can be found insulated pockets of potentials, and we have seen with blogs that it can lead us far, especially since the penetration of Internet is now phenomenal, regardless of traditional North/South cleavages.

However this billowing wave is requiring our constant attention and asks for sincere questioning on our part. Such things as intellectual property, with the peer-to-peer sharing controversies, that threatens (or so we believe) our economy, but rather needs to be addressed in a more constructive way than repression. It is an opportunity to seize, as it affects how we conceive of things once thought given and help reshape our reality.