Does the Web learn?

O.K., Emergence again. I’m having some trouble with Johnson’s writing about whether the Internet learns. “So if neurons can swarm their way into sentient brains, is it so inconceivable that the process might ratchet itself up one more level?” he asks rhetorically. “Couldn’t individual brains connect with one another, this time via the digital language of the Web, and form something greater than the sum of their parts[...]?”

Johnson doesn’t think the Web is becoming a giant brain. I don’t know if I do either, but something with his reasoning bugs me. “Emergence isn’t some mystical force that comes into being when agents collaborate” he contends. The Web does connect “more sentient beings together than any technology before it”. In this regard it can be seen as a brain. “But both brains and cities do more than just connect, because intelligence requires both connectedness and organization.”

Then he asks whether the web is self-organizing, whether it becomes more organized as it grows. No, he answers and refers to the popularity of portals and search engines, the “mapmakers” (Yahoo, Google etc) that have become almost as interesting to people as what they map. The Web doesn’t self-organize into districts and neighborhoods, he says. This is the thing that nags me.

Look up neighborhood on Dictionary.com; it’s defined as “a district or area with distinctive characteristics” or “the surrounding area; vicinity”. So the neighborhood is whatever is close-by. It has to do with closeness, with being able to transport yourself from where you are to another place nearby. When a city self-organizes, it becomes more convenient in this regard. If you are in, say, a sheet-music store, and can’t find a particular piece, you can just step into the next store down the street.

So, what’s so different between a district with lots of sheet-music stores and an Open Directory category listing online sheet-music stores? Transportation on the Web is fast. In a way, it’s as if the entire Internet is a magic neighborhood where everything is nearby. And non-commercial sites often join web rings. There’s even a web ring for sheet music. In this sense, the web ring is even more of a neighborhood, because you can find other related places from where you are. It’s as if Amazon would send you to Barnes and Noble if they don’t have the book you’re searching for. Perhaps they should? Until then, there are search engines for searching across online book stores, often with price-comparison functionality.

Given the advances in search engines and ways to organize the Web – which I agree with Johnson is “a system that is incapable of generating structure of its own” – I’d say that the Web learns. Also, there’s a steady movement to more effective ways of communicating, with the most interesting today being weblogs. It might not learn by way of the same type of self-organization as an ant colony, a brain or a city, though.