B004R9Q09U EBOK (36 page)

The distinction between oral and literate cultures surfaces not just in the editorial content of Web sites, but increasingly at deeper structural levels as well. Many Web sites now support “social tagging” or other user-driven mechanisms for allowing visitors to organize the contents of a Web site. Popular sites like YouTube, Flickr, and de.licio.us give users a measure of control over how they organize the contents of the sites, allowing users to “tag” entries with keywords of their own choosing. The result is an emergent classification—sometimes called a “folksonomy”
⁷
—that, while typically flawed, allows users a great deal of flexibility and control over the information at hand. Over time, users typically reach a rough consensus over how a particular object should be categorized, and an emergent structure begins to take shape. A few sites, like
Amazon.com
, have tried to reconcile these bottom-up systems with more traditional top-down organizational models, with mixed results. The tension between oral and literate cultures seems to resist a smooth reconciliation.

At the level of organizational dynamics, the tension between literacy and orality manifests as a polarity between “fixity” and “fluidity” (to borrow John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid’s terms). Examples of fixed systems include books, filing systems, taxonomies, and ontologies: the static instruments of literacy. Fluid systems include e-mail, instant messaging, and chat rooms: the shifting miasma of the new orality. Fixed systems beget hierarchies, while fluid systems lend themselves to the social motility of networks. In recent years, many corporations have embraced the mantra of flattening their organization charts to become more responsive in the face of technological change. Even such hidebound bureaucracies as the U.S. Army are working to transform themselves into “edge organizations,”
⁸
driving decision-making responsibility away from the old command-and-control centers and toward the outer rim of the organization, in an effort to enable individuals to take better advantage of new communications technology. In the process, organizations large and small are undergoing radical and disruptive change.

Fixity and fluidity can and do coexist, however. “While it’s clear that self-organization is extraordinarily productive, so too is formal organization,” write Brown and Duguid. “Indeed, the two perform an intricate (and dynamic) balancing act, each compensating for the other’s failings. Self-organization overcomes formal organizing’s rigidity. Formal organization keeps at bay self-organization’s tendency to self-destruct.”
⁹
In other words, hierarchies and networks do not necessarily have to stand in opposition; they may not only coexist, but ultimately prove consilient. As Kevin Kelly puts it in his 1994 book
Out of Control
:

While the tension between hierarchies and networks may in the long run prove complementary, in the short term the results can look a lot like chaos. Today, the old hierarchies of the literate world are reeling from a collision with the chaotic energies of oral culture. This is more than just a clash of epistemologies; it is a conflict with potentially revolutionary implications. Throughout most of human history, the top layers of the institutional hierarchy have always belonged to the literate elite. Without a lettered class there would have been no Sumerian temples, no library at Alexandria, no monastic scriptoria. Even after the Gutenberg revolution, only a tiny handful of people actually produced written documents, let alone whole books. Today, however, the planet has more readers and writers than ever before, and increasingly they are connected to each other on the Internet.
The long-term results of such a dramatic technological shift may be impossible to predict, but in the near term one thing seems plain enough: As people find their way online, they seem to coalesce into small groups.

Before the age of television, many historians believed that the spread of literacy signaled the forward march of technological progress, in which human civilization was moving inexorably forward toward higher degrees of social complexity. In this view, the spread of information technologies helped smaller communities coalesce into larger entities: bands into tribes, tribes into city-states, city-states into nations, nations into empires, and so on. Culture and technology propelled each other forward. Recent history, however, seems to support an alternative view that in our modern technological era human culture may not be moving unidirectionally at all, but rather multidirectionally. The notion of inevitable progress toward hierarchical complexity began to fracture in the 1960s, with the rise of the great modern liberation movements: civil rights, the antiwar movement, feminism, sexual liberation, gay rights. All of these social movements also happened to coincide with the spread of electronic media. Suddenly, women, minorities, homosexuals, and other previously marginalized groups had access to technologies that provided new windows into the culture at large. Televised images provided a unifying reference point that encouraged like-minded individuals to seek each other out. Small, self-organized communities emerged around common causes and shared values. In each of these cases, spontaneous networks emerged as individuals began to communicate with each other, thanks in large part to the facilitative power of electronic media. As these spontaneous networks joined together, they began to challenge the existing institutional power structures. Black citizens demanded the vote; women demanded equal rights; homosexuals demanded legal equality. The same dynamic played out in smaller groups as well, as the cultural convulsions of the 1960s brought wave after wave of spontaneous bottom-up challenges to the traditional top-down establishment. The success of these self-organized movements seemed to call into question the unidirectional progression from smaller to large units of social organization. In
stead, it seemed, the age of electronic media was leading not to the forward march of civilization, but rather to social and cultural fragmentation. That trajectory toward social atomization would accelerate further with the advent of the personal computer and, later, the Internet.
¹¹

The 1960s liberation movements provided the social backdrop for the emergence of the personal computer industry. The first-generation PC hackers, many of whom traced their lineage to Doug Engelbart’s 1968 San Francisco demonstration (see
Chapter 11
), aligned themselves with the countercultural values of the hippie movement, embracing an ethos of personal empowerment in contrast to the old top-down, command-and-control systems of the mainstream military–industrial computing industry.
¹²
Ted Nelson—the philosophical godfather of the Web—always portrayed himself as an ardent antiestablishmentarian. For the early programmers the PC represented a vehicle for personal liberation from the oppressive control of hierarchical institutions.

As PCs moved into the workplace in the 1980s, they triggered a struggle between self-directed “power users,” who wanted to take advantage of their increasingly powerful desktop computers, and old guard information technology departments that continued to insist on centralized control (a tension that still carries over to this day in many large organizations). That simmering tension would finally boil over when the Internet started allowing those users to network with each other directly, bypassing the old command-and-control systems. For many old-guard organizations, the results proved nothing short of paroxysmic. As the Internet gave employees more avenues for reaching out to each other—via the Web, e-mail, or instant messaging—they started to coalesce into spontaneous, self-organizing groups that often bore little resemblance to the formal structure of the organization chart. Decades after the liberation movements of the 1960s had peaked, the same revolutionary ethic was echoing in the corridors of corporate power. Organizations found themselves forced to change in response to the emerging technology. Fueled by the growth of personal computing and network technology, many organizations have since had to come to terms with an ongoing transfer of power, away from the old central planning
hierarchies and toward increasingly self-organized groups of individuals.

Meanwhile, across the Internet, new communities are constantly emerging, dissolving, and reforming. This burgeoning network activity does not spell the end of institutional hierarchies, however. As we have seen over and over again, hierarchies and networks are constantly spawning each other. One instructive contemporary example comes from Wikipedia, the ambitious public Internet encyclopedia that in a few short years has grown to encompass millions of entries written by thousands of individual users. For all its populist appeal, Wikipedia’s sheer growth has forced it to develop a set of hierarchical control systems, instituting a governing organization and approval processes to exert a measure of top-down regulation over the sprawling bottom-up activity of its contributors. As the network has grown, a new governing hierarchy emerged.

Large-scale bottom-up systems like Wikipedia remain the exception, however, as Internet users continue to congregate in small groups that often take shape outside of traditional institutional containers. While this tendency toward self-organization might seem like an effect of the Internet’s democratic architecture, such behavior also harkens back to our deepest rooted social instincts. For most of our species’ history, human beings have interacted in small, tightly woven communities: families, villages, guilds, and other social groups whose members were bound by ties of direct kinship or close personal affiliation. Only in the past few thousand years have people allowed themselves to be governed by institutional bodies. On the scale of evolutionary history, institutions remain a short-lived hypothesis. Yet for tens of thousands of years, human beings have interacted as social animals, following unwritten norms strengthened by kinship, reinforced by the limbic responses that strengthen our personal relationships, and transmitted through the spoken word. Today, we are seeing those instincts returning to the fore, as people adapt new technologies to invoke the ancient emotional circuitry that carried us through the age before symbols. The future of memory may lie not in our heads but in our hearts.