Software Evolution and Social Change, Part 1
Another important point about Lehman's work: It could be read as implying that Radio has passed into the territory of diminishing returns, where its increase in complexity is out of proportion to its increase in utility. This seems to me distinctly possible, having spent some time last night trying (unsuccessfully) to divine the structure of the database. Radio seems to me to be a patch on something (presumably Frontier): One of those simplifications from one perspective that ends up complicating things remarkably from another. On the one hand, stripping out large pieces of functionality can make a system less vulnerable to errors; on the other, it more often than not leaves it harder to really understand, because one is left with lots of purposeless stubs and no explanations for their function.
Radio, though, seems to be occupying an interesting spot in the consumer-technological ecology, and it's a spot that illustrates just how quickly these metaphors break down and how inextricable -- in a nutshell, how ecological -- are the interconnections between the intentional and the accidental realms. Radio may in fact become too unwieldy or remain too poorly documented to really occupy the forefront of the wave for very long. But by its existence, and by the proclivities of the people who drive it, Radio seems to be inspiring development in areas only peripherally related to its core function (to the extent that it has one). It's the wide deployment of a tool like Radio, with its capability to extend the applications beyond "mere blogging", along with the aesthetic biases of Winer & co, that may well drive major ecological changes.
In other words, when the dust clears, smaller, lighter, faster, "cheaper" things will probably have superceded Radio. Things less universally flexible, but better documented, easier to deploy, easier to understand. But they would never have been thought of without the first hesitant implementations from the Radio team.
To the extent that Radio drives the spread and development of these simple web services to promote the sharing of data (which, at base, is what we're talking about), it may drive progress toward a society where all connections between persons are modeled as sharing of data. The blogging "community" has several ideas of what such a society would be like; none I've seen so far are as dark as mine, though. It will probably lead, for example, to at least a period of time where relations are conceptualized in utilitarian terms: What does it do for me to know X? Why should I bear children with Y? Societies driven by purely utilitarian motives rarely do well, as far as I can see. Only after time and, I imagine, a fair amount of suffering, will an accomodation be found -- through social/memetic evolution, of course...
This, among other things, drives home to me that I need to capture my vision of what it will be like to live "connected" at a whim, all the time. To be "wet-wired", as I see the ultimate short-term expression: Thought-controlled electronics, interfaced securely to external devices that permit us to shop and connect anywhere we're in range of a node. Among the consequences:
- Increased valorization of "the urban" over the rural, as people feel less and less "at home" when away from a broadband wireless node.
- Loss of faculties for non-assisted interaction, as people become accustomed to the immediacy of contact through our more or less wet-wired mobile phones.
- An increase in psychological isolation, as people learn to build inner sancuaries for themselves against the commonplace contact. The effects might be analogous to those of living in a very densely-populated city. But only analogous -- not directly mappable.
- A stronger divergence in behavior by personality type, especially along the Myersian E:I and S:N axes. Paradoxially, hyper-connectedness might well lead at least some people to feel more intensely lonely than ever.
'Nuff maundering. Need to actually do some work this afternoon. I can see that throughout-the-day blogging may be as hazardous to my productivity as Plastic...
