The History of the Internet and Our HyperLocal Future: Part 1 of 2.

I haven’t forgotten to finish my thoughts on The Evolutionary Trajectory of the Story of God (how’s that for a mouthful). I just wanted there to be a bit of a pause between my deconstruction of “classical Protestant interpretation” and my proposal for a new way of situating ourselves in the locality of our scripture. So I’ll pick that back up next week with my advancement of those ideas. But for now . . . a quick 2 part collection on the internet and hyperlocality (explained tomorrow – but previews here and here).

I’ve been thinking about this lately after having a conversation with my parents trying to explain to them what the internet is and where it’s going. I’ll make this as simple and non-nerdy as possible.

The internet first started as a way to network government (military & university) groups together. It’s creation was built off of the imagination of a few guys who wanted to create a way to connect computers across great distances. In basically the same way the phone worked, they wanted to create a series of networks (power lines) that were able to connect with other users.

At it’s inception, it’s primary purpose was to be a purveyor of information . . . books, documents, files. Although it was built on the back of the world wide web (www), it was still a very linear system. Information traveled one user to another in a straight line. Information was uploaded from point A to point B and then downloaded from B to point A. It was less of a web and more of a line.

Then over the last few years a new kind of internet was being created. Generically called Web 2.0, it was the second generation of what the web was supposed to be. It was as if the original internet – the one we grew up with Encyclopedia Britannica, AOL, Explorer, Netscape – had a birthday and finally decided to grow up and be something more than the middle man for the transformation of information from one point to another. It’s hard to tell when this second generation of internet life really developed and what led to it (although peer-to-peer downloading was a major influencer in flattening the architecture) but needless to say it is alive and in full swing now.

This “Web 2.0″ is characterized as a collaboration, open-source, aggregator, and social network to name a few. Although we still have both forms of the internet today . . . the internet is quickly becoming revolutionized by this new collaborative network that is Web 2.0. In this model, the internet is no longer linear. Instead it has become a true web. It is no longer static, but rather dynamic, in constant flux and a state of change.

In the old system, only the gatekeepers (the programmers, the designers, those who knew the language and how to create web pages) were able to create and contribute to the web. In the new system, everyone can be a player. There is no hierarchy. It is a flattened landscape that is run by everyone. Before you had to know how to create a web page by learning a complicated internet language (which consequently has gone through many evolutions). Now you can create a web page in under 5 minutes without knowing any of the languages.

Simply compare and contrast Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia to see the change. In the old system the Encyclopedia Brittanica was king. It was a home for large amounts of information. It was created by a small group of elite scientists, historians, and academics who contributed to the source material. In the new system, Wikipedia is created by millions of everyday people who contribute at will and at random. In the old model, there was a hierarchy where the elite academics controlled and created the information. They uploaded it to their site. We downloaded it for our school reports. In Wiki-world, 4th graders, college students, and soccer moms are creating the content alongside the academics.

With Web 2.0 sites like Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr, the internet now becomes less like the middle man in the conveying of information and more like the medium for integrating a variety of mediums with a variety of people across a variety of platforms. These sites integrate video, photos, calendars, blogs, music, and comments to name a few in an effortless web of connection. Things like this FriendWheel displaying the interconnectedness of all of my friends on a site like Facebook is a great example. Or the below image that shows the internet from a macro perspective with all of the interconnectedness of their hyperlinks to and from one another. From this view . . . the internet actually starts to look like a web, with it’s various roads, tubes, and networks criss-crossing connecting to each other.

It’s been said that new advancements in how we receive information lead to shifts in our worldviews. With the invention of roads (for chariot, horse, etc) we were able to communicate across great distances and exchange ideas in a new way. With the invention of the printing press we were able to communicate information in a new way. The same for trains, planes, and automobiles. Each new evolution in transportation aided the flow of information, increasing it and making it’s path more fluid and widespread.

The medium of the internet has created our last great worldview shift that we are currently undergoing.

My question is this . . . as the internet evolves from a linear purveyor of information to a collaborative, flattened, web-like society . . . what does that mean for how we view the world?

What does this mean for how we relate to one another? How does this effect our politics? Our economics? Our leadership models? What new metaphors will we need to develop to understand it?

And as we answer those questions . . . what does the new evolution of hyperlocality mean for the internet beyond “Web 2.0″?

“Web 3.0″ is way too generic. But what is beyond the curve? What is out on the edge as we speak that will one day be under our feet?

[tags]Hyperlocality, Hyperlocal, Open-Source, Web 2.0, History of Internet, Social Network[/tags]