Phil Tetlow

The Web's Awake is a book that draws from a diverse well of understandings. It brings together a number of ideas centred on complexity and directly relates them back to the phenomenon we know today as the World Wide Web, or "Web" for short. This naturally brings with it more subtle subject matter dealing with aspects such as dynamics and a variety of patterns and theories. By feeding heavily on both the material understandings of sciences like physics, chemistry and biology as well as the abstract formalities of mathematics and computing, it points the way to a new field of scientific endeavour; the field of web science. Where the book distinguishes itself is in its comparison between the Web, as the most complex sociotechnical system known today, and the absolute pinnacle of all complex systems, life itself. If you're intrigued about connections, new perspectives, evolutionary potentials and the bewildering properties of complex, entangled systems then this is certainly the book for you.

Undoubtedly the Web has provided a collection of technologies that is having a profound effect on mankind. Like the wheel, the plough and steam power before it, it is a proving a truly differentiating tool in our world, changing the very ways in which we interact with each other, our surroundings and our socioeconomic systems. But, unlike the great technologies that have come before it, the Web is different. Why? Because its phenomenal growth and complexity are starting to outstrip our capability to control it directly, making it impossible for us to grasp its completeness in one go. It may quite literally be taking on a life of its own. A set of emergent characteristics and behaviours are now starting to appear that we have not programmed individually. These are apparently starting to increase in number and strength, leading some to believe that the Web not only has its own life, but may also now be worthy of being considered a living organism in its own right; a new posthuman species consisting of just one isolated member.

Many have worked on the concept of emergent properties within highly complex systems, concentrating heavily on the underlying mechanics concerned. Few, however, have studied the fundamentals involved from a sociotechnical perspective. In short, the virtual anatomy of the Web remains relatively uninvestigated. The Web's Awake therefore attempts to seriously explore this apparent gap, citing a number of provocative, yet objective, similarities from studies relating to both real world and digital systems.

It is not a book of definitive answers or rigorous proofs. It is a book about connections, new perspectives, immutable patterns and the bewildering properties of complex,entangled systems. By referencing material from a broad range of fields it presents a collage of interlinked facts, assertions and coincidences which boldly point to a Web with a powerful potential for life.

The World Wide Web is truly astounding. It has changed the way we interact, learn and innovate. It is the largest sociotechnical system humankind has created and is advancing at a pace that leaves most in awe. It is an unavoidable fact that the future of the world is now inextricably linked to the future of the web. Almost every day it appears to change, to get better and increase its hold on us.

For all this we are starting to see underlying stability emerge. The way that web sites rank in terms of popularity, for example, appears to follow laws with which we are familiar. What is fascinating is that these laws were first discovered, not in fields like computer science or information technology, but in what we regard as more fundamental disciplines like biology, physics and mathematics. Consequently the web, although synthetic at its surface, seems to be quite 'natural' deeper down, and one of the driving aims of the new field of web science is to discover how far down such "naturalness" goes

If the web is natural to its core, that raises some fundamental questions. It forces us, for example, to ask if the central properties of the web might be more elemental than the truths we cling to from our understandings of the physical world. In essence, it demands that we question the very nature of information. Understanding Information and Computation is about such questions and one possible route to potentially mind-blowing answers.

The next time you crave to tweet that all-consuming idea or poke that newest of acquaintances, spare a thought for what you are about to do. The snippets of information you choose to send might be exactly the same as those used in a letter to a friend perhaps thirty years ago, but today things are quite different. Then your words would almost certainly have been received only by those you wrote to and would have turned into nothing more than cherished memories. But today those words have the potential to reach vast numbers of people and could easily remain in their original form and accessible to anyone well beyond your natural life span. Some people understand this and use it to good effect, but most do not. Andy Warhol’s world of fifteen minutes of fame for all is very close, yet still we have little idea what that means for us as individuals, communities or society as a whole.

This issue is not just about the changing ways in which we communicate. It is more about our hunger for information and our increasing ability to get it, to process and to share it. It is also about how recent creations, like the World Wide Web, have changed our way of life and how we apply such information constantly in that life.

Science has tried many times and under many descriptions to get at the fundamental nature of information, yet still we only have a fragmented picture as that slippery word “information” shifts from computing to linguistics to quantum physics and so on. But this is not a matter for pessimism, just because there is no single view of what information is. We now understand that some of the most advanced fields of science rely heavily on the notion of information for their existence.This suggests that we have to be brave and radical when thinking about information and not look only in the obvious places.

When Alan Turing and his contemporaries set about decrypting enemy messages during World War II, they made several assumptions. They assumed, for instance, that human operators would be stationed at both ends of the communication channels they were intercepting and that those sending and receiving messages would speak the same language. Likewise, they assumed that the grammar and punctuation of that language would provide tell-tale insights into the message content being sent. Working alongside Turing, however, was a young and imaginative mathematician with other ideas. Bill Tutte has been largely written out of history, simply because of the secrecy, significance and success of his war-time work. But make no mistake, he was as much a hero of the 20th century as Alan Turing. Boil his contribution down to its absolute essence though, and he really only added one thing. Rather than assuming anything about the flow of enemy messages, he chose to take nothing for granted and worked instead on how to hard-wire the relationships present between the characters and symbols involved.

That move away from assumption towards the explicit recognition of meaningful relationships in information proved a game changer. Not only did it quickly advance allied decryption techniques, but it went on to aid the prediction of critical enemy positions prior to D-Day. As a result, Turing soon travelled to the US to share all he knew with a rapidly expanding US military intelligence. On the list of those he would meet was Claude Shannon, a fellow graduate of Princeton University and a somewhat kindred spirit. What neither of them could have known back then was that the seeds sown during their time together would eventually result in the whirlwind of innovation we now know as the Information Revolution. Without that meeting of minds, we likely wouldn’t have today’s TV, radio or Internet networks and the World Wide Web would almost certainly be consigned to the realms of science fiction.

But more than that, what Turing, Tutte, Shannon and others did was open up a window onto some of the most fundamental physical properties of the universe.

In recent years, physicists have come to appreciate information’s central role in the universe’s grand plan. That and the fact that an explicit understanding of the informational relationships involved may well be key to unlocking many of the universe’s deepest secrets. That makes the birth of both Computer and Information Science not only essential to the explosion of modern technological success, but also our understanding of reality itself. In recognising that, what unfolds is a story not only about Turing and his pioneering colleagues, but also great thinkers like Einstein, Faraday, Wittgenstein and others. It therefore pulls in much of modern history and touches on seminal events like the birth of the atomic bomb. It also hints at the reasons behind the various social and political divides we see in the world today. So, in many ways, the story of how we became more informed about information is also the story of the modern age. What you will read of here is the role that information plays in that ongoing saga and many of the twists and turns that have brought us to where we are with information today. In it you will learn that, unbeknown to Turing and others, their work would not only help overthrow the Nazis and thaw the chilling atmosphere of the Cold War to come, but also echo down the ages to remain relevant in a conflict still raging today. That sees the Computer and Information Scientists at loggerheads as they fight to find a right and justifiable place for meaning in information’s definition.