[WEB4LIB] Digital Metaphors

[Nick Arnett]

Gerry,

You might appreciate some of Pam Samuelson's writings on the effect of 
digital media on intellectual property.  She is a law professor at Berkeley 
and a year or so ago won a MacArthur "genius" grant for her work in this 
area.  She uses plasticity as a metaphor to explain some of the challenges 
of applying existing IP law to digital media.  Her writings shouldn't be 
difficult to find.

Pam and her husband Bob Glushko, who is a hypertext expert, are the people 
who clued me into Elizabeth Eisenstein's work on the history of the 
printing press, which is what really got me going on the explorations I've 
been doing the last six or seven years.

As for fluidity and malleability, I can offer some of my own intuitions, 
though I haven't really thought them through yet.  The connectivity that 
exists within networked digital media gives rise to patterns of behavior 
that science also observes in fluids and malleable solids.  Those kinds of 
physical objects don't lend themselves to reductionist explanations because 
of their complexity, but they are yielding to pattern-discovery methods 
that increasingly rely heavily on digital simulations, thus further 
revealing the parallels.

As a concrete example, you might read about "simulated annealing," in which 
complex information structures are optimized by a process that resembles a 
metallurgical annealing process.  It is described fairly well in Stuart 
Kauffman's "At Home in the Universe," a book on complexity and the origins 
of life.

I've come to believe that understanding the forces at work in the 
generations of patterns in complex, cooperative systems is going to have as 
great an impact on the world as our understanding of feedback in complex, 
competitive systems has been in the modern world.  It represents an 
understanding of systems at a higher level, one in which classical 
cause-and-effect logic is impractical, at best, due to the very 
characteristics you describe -- plasticity, fluidity and other expressions 
of interconnected complexity.

The subject of patterns has become a chapter in my book, but I've hardly 
begun to outline the chapter, much less to write it.  Thus, more later.

And out of a feeling of responsibility to connect this back to libraries... 
I think that the emergence of digital media forces us to think of an 
organizational scheme for information as a pattern, rather than the 
classical idea of sets of objects with common properties.  That point of 
view will lead to more serendipitous discovery that the classical approach 
could.  This is not to throw out the classical idea, but to see it as a 
lower-level point of view than the pattern.  Well, I hope that makes 
sense.  I realize it is still quite vague.

Nick