Dr. Vladimir Zwass

University Convocation Address

24th September 2003  

“Yet it is human relationships that make the Web.”

Spinning the World Wide Web:
Global Village or Virtual Archipelago?

President Adams, distinguished platform party, friends of the University, my colleagues, and our students: I appreciate the honor of speaking to you.

"Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made," tells us, rather pessimistically, across the ages the great moralist Immanuel Kant. And here is this magnificent creation of the last few decades, the Internet, the global network of networks, the connective tissue. And here is the Web, the accessible and exhaustive information and knowledge matrix, interconnected by the Internet. Both are growing organically, without a central control, and with the speed unprecedented for an artifact in human history.

Let us look at just a few telling numbers. The recent "E-Commerce and Development Report" of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development estimates the number of Internet users around the globe at 655 million at the end of the last year – that is, 10% of the world's population. Google processes 200 million searches a day, in 89 languages, with only one-third coming from the United States. Verisign, a company that operates the central registry for the top-level domains .com, .net, and .org and that runs domain name servers around the globe, processes 9 billion access requests a day. A quantum jump in these numbers is expected with the dramatic expansion of the wireless access and the move to the version 6 of the Internet Protocol which will afford a practically infinite number of addresses. The growth rate of electronic commerce (which is largely, but not exclusively, Internet-based) is estimated at 54 to 70% a year: Although the absolute figures vary among the estimators, there is a consensus about these exceptional rates of growth. Lest we forget, the Web and the browser opened the Internet to the wider world just a decade ago.

The Web brings to life Vannevar Bush's vision of a memex, a device that would allow you to access the knowledge you desired by following trails of association – links, as we know them so well today. (It is apposite to note here that for Bush, the top adviser to FDR during the World War II, who wrote about memex in 1945, national security was predicated on research strength, and that he has created the present system of federal funding for university research – which has also led to the Internet.) When taken together with the people using it, the Web brings to mind far more expansive visions of Vladimir Vernadsky and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: the notion of noosphere, the thinking layer over our globe – visions of all of us thinking together about the issues of our common Earth. With global connectivity and global knowledge, surely a global village would emerge, as promised us by another visionary, Marshall McLuhan. He observed in The Gutenberg Galaxy that electronic media collapse space and time to enable people separated by oceans to communicate as though in a village market (these specific words were not among the very many others McLuhan used). In fulfillment of that vision today, this virtual village should emerge on the Web, linking people around the globe.

In this global village, we will surely want to speak to one another with empathy, understand one another, and evolve shared meanings – because we all care about the world we share, our only village - for now. Yes, but what about the crookedness of the human timber?

Village or Islands

Is there a global Web community and is it indeed a global village? Has Immanuel Kant no quarter here? Does, to the contrary, his categorical imperative prevail, and on the Web all the people of our Earth do the right thing, because we care to do right in our human family? Do we indeed want to share and be with all on the Web? As you well know, not always. A virtual archipelago of islands, each an on-line community with its own evolving meaning and rhetoric, would be the other extreme outcome. The Web can indeed be a means to creating our own particularistic little islands, surrounded by their natural moats, impervious, or, even, hostile, to all others. A community of exclusion may arise on the Web around an idea, an ethnicity, a religion, or simply a common behavior. The members of that community can always land on the Website of their own, with the links to the like-minded. Going further, a terrorist organization can use the cryptographic technique of steganography to hide in an ordinary photograph a message accessible to its members and unseen by anyone else, or recruit with videos distributed over the broadband Internet. Surreptitious virtual communities, certainly antithetical to the goals of the Internet, and to the aims of humanity, are technologically supportable.

How are we then to make sense of the Internet-Web combine? In a recent paper, I have tried to identify its nodal aspects. They fall into the domains ranging from the computation and connectivity to collaboration and commerce. I would like to look at some of them with you now through the lens of being with one another – or not.

At the foundation of the Internet-Web are the largely utilitarian technological aspects: a computing utility, a development platform, a delivery vehicle, a universal telecommunications network. Indeed, we have here an emerging global computing utility, that can be run by the grid-computing software to deploy any idle computational power distributed around the world. We also have the common software development platform as well as a delivery vehicle for digital goods and for services – all factors in achieving greater economic efficiency. As a transformational technology, the Internet-Web, and the consequents of its use, lead to what is sometimes called Schumpeterian economic growth. When exploited, these utilitarian aspects also have significant societal consequences by distributing (and redistributing) human well-being. Having developed an extensive telecommunications infrastructure, the Indian states of Karnataka (with its well-known capital of Bangalore) and Andhra Pradesh (with the capital in Hyderabad) are able to tap into the global distribution of labor and activate the resource of college graduates. These states are a major destination for the outsourcing of technology development. The global redistribution of knowledge work, enabled by the Internet, is one of the most powerful incipient economic trends. Its impacts will be felt in the coming decade and we – governments, non-profits, business organizations, and individuals - are all well advised to think it through. When superimposed on the long-range demographic forecasts for the more established developed countries, this trend may present an opportunity rather than a problem – in the future.

As a universal telecommunications network, the Internet affords rapid deployment of corporate and personal internetworking. The planned launch within a year or so of the broadband wireless access to the Internet via the Wi-Fi technology anywhere within the 50 U.S. urban areas holds out a promise of accelerated economic development. Yet – an archipelago of urban agglomerations would emerge in the sea of slower access. (We in this country are by far not the leaders in fast Internet: while only 15% of US households have high-speed connections, two-thirds of the South Korean do – with notable and quantifiable salutary effects in societal interaction.) Far greater divides of digital opportunity persist. The United States has more computers than all other countries combined. At the bottom of the Internet access capability, the 49 least-developed nations have 10% world's population but less than three-tenths of one percent of world's Internet users. Islands of a different kind indeed.

But let us look at the higher levels of the Web-Internet combine. The Web is a marketplace, a medium, a forum, and a collaboratory.

As a marketplace, the Web had been touted a few years back to lead to ubiquitous frictionless transactions on a global scale. It has not, and certainly not in the consumer-oriented realm, where the lack of international legal harmonization has contributed to the trust deficit. But – Amazon.com has been shipping "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" to 175 countries. The Web is not simply a marketplace, however. Take eBay – the only profitable large consumer-oriented e-commerce company. Let us think about the reason for it success. The firm has not just provided an auction venue. Rather, it has created a network of relationships among individuals, both buyers and sellers, as the case may be in a given transaction. The relationships now precede transactions and are carried across time in the reputational systems of eBay, which have sellers rated by the buyers, who are in turn rated by the sellers. This is an important lesson.

If we look at the Web as a network of relationships, we may indeed gain an insight into the issue captioned in my today's talk. The Web is a long-lasting repository of the traces of our life. The-Web-in-use is a large part of the dynamics of our lives. If we use the Web to mirror our divisions – that are often merely exaggerated distinctions – in the physical world, we lose. Indeed, the potential anonymity on the Web and its aspect as a forum open to all, both for speech and for access to that speech, amplifies the potential for divisiveness and mischief. Because as a medium of human communication, the Web is unique for its combination of accessibility in both passive and active modes. The very presence of this medium alters the force field. The Web has provided the forum for virtual communities, relatively durable social networks of relationships whose participants interact within a framework of explicit and tacit policies. The communities can be a potent force for good. Egregious behavior stemming from power may be curtailed by the very expectation of a reaction in Web communities. They are powerful social amplifiers. A company's actions will be effectively challenged, as Intel discovered when it tried to gloss over a design error in its microprocessor some years ago

As they involve themselves is this network of relationships, some individuals begin to derive their sense of identity from being enmeshed in the Web. I would like you to ponder the words of a student equipped with a wearable computer with a persistent 24-hour-a-day Internet connection: "I become my computer. …I feel invincible, sociable, better prepared. I am naked without it. With it, I'm a better person." (Yes, it was an MIT student.) Have the Web relationships taken away from the personhood? Caught in the Web?

Our New Forum

The Web is a simulacrum and not a replacement for human relationships. Yet it is human relationships that make the Web. The creators of MIT's OpenCourseWare know full well that the success of their courses depends on the emergence of on-line communities that would appropriate and elaborate the content, and collectively construct the educational experience. Open-source communities of professionals develop and keep refining publicly available software without a direct financial motivation. For them it is a collaboratory – a laboratory for collaboration across the time and space divide. We can see altruism here (if we do not wish to speak about building reputations). At the same time, the proliferation of the Web has also become an occasion for the spreading patenting of business methods (such as Amazon.com's 1-click or Priceline's customer-suggested price), which are generally considered an invasion of the commons shared by all of us.

The Web offers a unique forum of potential mass assembly, a unique means of spontaneous mobilization of people located anywhere in the world. When placed in the perspective of one of the Germany's great and good, philosopher Jürgen Habermas, the availability of such a forum expands the public sphere where, through discourse and debate, public opinion can evolve and have an impact. With spreading Internet skills and translation facilities of the Web, this public sphere needs not heed borders. And then - thousands of hate groups on the Web (you can see their URL directory on the very Web – with 104 pages of fine-print listing). And then, simple parochialism of Web communities that affiliate to cut themselves off from others. Habits of the heart, culture? The question I asked in the title of this talk can have no positive answer. It can only alert us to what we ought to strive for. As I started these remarks mentioning Immanuel Kant, perhaps we should conclude that there is a moral imperative surpassing his, and that is to always include "the other" in our world. We do not have to be similar to the other, yet we share the common humanity, the most precious gift.

Let us not forget that the Web is not a world apart, embedded as it is in everyday life. I remember at a recent conference dinner the scholar sitting to my right telling me about the visit of information-systems faculty to a poor seaside village in one of the Asian countries. They set up an electronic kiosk for the local fishermen with the readouts of water temperature at various fishing spots around – predictors of fish presence. These scholars taught the villagers how to fish. Now that is a global village in action.

A medium, a forum, a marketplace, a network of relationships, a collaboratory: the Web-Internet combine enable us to find one another, establish relationships, and benefit from them over time, all in the context of the very real and tangible world. Whether we make it into a global village, or whether we fracture it into islands, is really up to us.

The mission of FDU is to prepare students as global citizens who can function and succeed across cultures in an increasingly interdependent world. Indeed, the Web makes the world ever more interdependent – for better or for worse. FDU students are being prepared to "prosper in the global marketplace of ideas, commerce and culture." As we have seen, today the Web is a crucial constituent of such a competitive – and collaborative – space. As we assemble in a university, a place where knowledge is transmitted and elaborated, let us always remember the good that can come from our sharing the Web, and let us remember that we, the tree of humanity, need to stand for this good. And that means each of us.

Thank you very much.

FDU · campuses · global education · help