The Bionomics Institute

1996 Conference Abstracts

The organic, geometric growth of the Internet and internetworking is an example of an economic entity exhibiting behavior best described as bionomic. Traditional economic theory leads to constant predictions of impending doom for the Internet and internetworking, while bionomic theory better predicts the ability of networks to evolve rapidly to meet the needs of their users.

The Internet as it currently exists is a static environment without a sense of place. Users interact only in online chats through a cluttered, text-based interface, or through electronic mail with the associated delays. Information is distributed with static pages read by solitary individuals. The medium as it stands is unused and unsuitable for its original purpose "... as a communications tool that [will] enable groups of people to work more efficiently in teams." (Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the WWW).

"At Active Paper, we see the Internet becoming a vehicle for collaboration and community on a global scale. Web pages will become Web places. Users will be able to work together on projects, interact with one another in realtime, and feel as if they're part of the greater community. People will work and play in a giant interactive world. The Net will become a place

The cost of information has never been lower than it is now. Media and the facts that are carried aloft by it have proceeded down a strange path of counter-evolution, as the value of information increases along with its availability. We are used to thinking of media and information as a natural resource, the mental tap water that irrigates both our casual conversations and our business decisions. (One could argue that creativity provided the fertilizer for many of these joint plots.) But our natural resource shows signs of contamination.

Until very recently, only those who could afford to treat credit as a natural resource (and therefore had money to burn) bothered with secondary filtering technology - the Release 1.0 home-delivered jug, the personal assistant home processing station. However, as the internet and the web open the sluice gates, and offer a flood of fact and fiction to all, the average information consumer can no longer trust that all the datajuice hemorrhaging from his computer is potable. The streams flowing from the advice aquifers he trusts (The Wall Street Journal, CNN) now share a duct with liquid pumped from unknown parts (The Drudge Report? Flux?). He needs a cheap, reliable filtering device.

Some might argue that "intelligent agents" are the answer, and, to be sure, this technology offers a reliable method for retrieve specific kinds of data. But it does this service at the cost of privacy, as the agent shares the information it learns about you (it's "boss") with its real owner, who can sale this (highly filtered and pure) information to advertisers. Or whoever.

I propose a more impersonal kind of filtering technology, one that is as appealingly retro as it is efficient: Branded information. Instead of selling the filtering technology, sell users a bottled beverage, a specific kind of information that isn't so much personalized as reliably consistent. While to offer branded instead of personalized information is a step backwards from the idea of "increasing customer share," it is model which allows for the development of a multitude of info-flavors, one for each different craving. While some argue that the pace of information technologies and the growth of information technologies means that we will all be receiving our information from the same source, and at a rate too rapid to analyze it, I argue that it is in the information-providers' favor to allow distinct tastes and takes to flourish. Because no one wants to drink pure water all the time.

So have a Suck and smile.

Nothing else is a Slate.

And most of all:

Image is nothing. Thirst is everything.