Connective intelligence and the digital society

The World Wide Web 2.0 allows people to share information at an unprecedented pace and volume through handheld devices, desktop computers, video and audio, creating a digital society in which citizens can freely acquire, share, validate and compare information.  For Joël de Rosnay, it signifies that the creation and the content of mass media is no longer the monopoly of politicians and media moguls who may "own" and control print or television media. The Web has taken on the role of "media of the masses-by the masses-for the masses". Contributors to web content, or "pronétaires" to use the compound term de Rosnay has coined to describe them, help develop a collective and connective intelligence, in some sense creating what may be regarded as a planetary macro-organism.  The programmer eventually running this rapidly evolving macro-organism will be a Universal Operating System, composed not of one solitary individual, but all pronétaires.  One can perhaps gain insights that help understand the development of connective intelligence by borrowing from the epistemological framework of Chaos Theory. Within such a framework, one can usefully compare the process of Web evolution to analogous examples from the biological sciences. 

With print, radio, and television media, information is essentially disseminated using a "top-down approach". There is little feedback of communication in the direction of consumer to producer, and average people do not have much influence over the production process. The same cannot be said for content that is present on the web.  Internet users and contributors now possess the means of information production and dissemination using a combination of their own hardware, such as cell phones and digital cameras, and software which can often be freely downloaded; specific examples are Facebook and web blogs.  Pronétaires are also the programmers and authors of this digital Internet ecosystem.  They contribute data and can acquire and validate each other's information.  The feedback from other pronétaires is what makes the system dynamically responsive.  With this new "bottom-up" approach, pronétaires do not necessarily gain financial payment or even recognition for their contribution, but indirectly receive a reciprocal benefit for their input from the enrichment of collective knowledge.  This is in marked contrast to the case with print or television networks. Sites, such as agoravox.fr, (to which de Rosnay is himself a regular contributor), have harnessed the power of the mass media and now facilitate sharing of information on a massive scale.

Joël de Rosnay suggests it is useful to categorise information on 3 scales:  individual knowledge (I know), collective group knowledge (we know) and connective knowledge (we know what they know).  The "wisdom of crowds" comes from tools such as crowd-sourcing where a broad cross section of the general public contributes their opinions and reacts to those of others.  Tools like crowd-sourcing have been used to economic benefit as an improved method for discovering new markets.  This type of shared information attains added value (which need not be equated with value in a monetary currency), as it becomes increasingly linked to other sites.  The new information spreads rapidly and people can react quickly to it in real-time.  For example, e-Bay takes advantage of real-time activity.

Crowds can provide an excellent source of "reliable" information, however this may not always prove to be so.  The power of collaborative and connective activity also has the potential to harm the general public.  For example, groups have the ability to impact the stock market through spreading rumours rapidly.  Hackers can try to infiltrate computer systems which can paralyse organised structures such as banks, businesses, telecommunications and even governments.  One such attempt was the case in the cyber-attack on Estonia 1997, and while this article was in preparation, Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the WWW concept, publicly bemoaned the internet spread of scientifically dubious rumours concerning the Large Hadron Collider at Cern.

The life sciences offer some analogies to help understand the development, the current state and the future of the so called technological macro-organism that is the WWW 2.0.  The behaviour of collective and connective intelligence on the WWW took time to develop to its current state.  After an apparent lag period, measurable growth was then slow for some time and then expanded rapidly.  This pattern is very reminiscent of the origins of life.  Likened to the development of many other complex organisms, for the WWW to emerge in its present state has taken many dynamic interactions occurring within the context of an ecosystem.  The web might even be said to have evolved the virtual equivalent of an "immune system", with an increasing array of tools that are designed to minimise the effect of harmful elements, thus preventing or "disinfecting" against increasingly sophisticated computer "viruses" and blocking the ingenious new threats of harmful "spam".  Indeed, each Internet tool is a discrete piece of the macro-organism, while the speaker likened each pronétaire to an individual neuron in the brain, both serving to transmit information and to reinforce or amplify "valuable" connections between users. 

The speaker enumerated five historic revolutions of "Western" science that stand out for him personally, as quantum leaps in the trajectory of humankind to date: the Copernican Revolution with the theory of heliocentrism proving that the earth is not the centre of the universe; the Cartesian Revolution of advancing technology; the Darwinian Revolution leading the way to modern evolutionary theory; the Systemic Revolution that integrated the previous paradigms and introduced a global approach; and Chaos Theory that describes the development of complex systems.  These events are not difficult to justify as paradigmatic turning points in human history and it is widely thought that the most recent addition to the repertoire, Chaos Theory, will complement, rather than supersede its predecessors.  Chaos theory has contributed to our present collective understanding of the construction of complex systems, such as the human body or the World Wide Web.  One can now study the scientific principles of network-building and the speaker concluded with a speculation that consciously building "thinking networks" or the "World Wide Mind" might well become a realistic task of the Internet of the future.