Thursday, October 8, 2009

Web Survival Methods -- Nic Mooney

The web is something that flickers across our screens, thus assuming the characteristics of its medium: flat, bright, a page at a time. But Jon Kleinberg's "The Structure of the Web" and Liben-Nowell's "Tracing Information Flow on a Global Scale Using Internet Chain-Letter" force us to perceive the Internet as something else, assuming a 3-dimensional shape realized in naturalistic terms: a dense core surrounded by a thick underbrush and thinning tendrils and stalks, and a deep and narrow tree, respectively. As I tried to envision Kleinberg's structure, the closest tangible thing my mind could envision was the refugee flotilla described in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. The interconnected linking and relinking back to the hub conjures up the image of this process of tying ever more ropes to other boats for greater security, as Stephenson describes. These links from one web page to another and back to the core and the secondary cores are not necessarily established because they are what is most natural to the individual page, but because that is how one survives in the vast world of the Internet, a place at once very crowded and very isolating. Like a raft adrift in the ocean, a page that does not plug itself into the system and play the game has little chance of doing more than floating along unnoticed and failing to thrive. In this sense, power structures function in a clear way on the web. If you do not make friends by you linking to them, them linking to you, and everybody linking to each other, as in web rings and contacts and friendships, your page will not be tied to other pages. If you do not use the right tools, like Facebook and Twitter and Digg that can send out information to large audiences, your page's loneliness is reinforced yet again. And most of all, if you refuse to participate with or utilize the grand arbiters of power (allowing engines to include your pages in search or trying to correctly seed your page so it does better in search results), like Google, your page essentially seeks to exist. The web is a constant bid for attention, but it is a bid with high stakes, whether for personal self-worth or a business's finances. A page without connections is very much adrift, alone, and at risk. And even though it is essentially all connected in Kleinberg's structures, those tendrils on the edges must be able to perceive their peril, as their hit counts barely budge and their businesses flounder. From the tendrils to the center, it is a constant battle to move closer to the core or even become the new core, to be safely submerged in the warmth of the interconnected ties made for cold reasons.

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