The Geography of Thought and the Web

During the last Christmas break, I finished a book titled The Geography of Thought. The subtitle of the book says "How Asians and Westerners Think Differently ... and Why," which well describes its theme. The book is interesting and informative despite the author often repeats the same thought here or there in book. One Amazon book reviewer called it "Interesting, but could have been so much better" and I am very much leaning towards the comment. The idea presented by the book is deserved to be thought again and again hundreds of times.

The book itself is worth of being recommended. But my interest of this post is on how the thought difference caused by the geography may have affected the construction of the Web and how it may continue to impact the Web evolution.

A phrase in the book that caught me is "Is the World Made Up of Nouns or Verbs?" In the eye of a computer scientist, this is neither a philosophical nor a linguistic question but a concrete question of engineering. To see it, allow me substitute only one word in the former question---Is the Web Made Up of Nouns or Verbs? The Web is an image of our world, isn't it?

In the book, Richard Nisbett (author) argued that the westerners tend to think of the world based on the distinction of objects. One object is certainly not another object. Wood is certainly not table. Airplane is certainly not iron. The world is made up by objects and it is a network of objects. Isn't the thought natural to us? Surely it is, especially to most of the Thinking Space readers I believe (since most of you are westerners).

On the other hand, Nisbett argued that the easterners actually think of the world differently. According to the easterners, the world is a tangled place of substances. One cannot even really name an object until he has comprehensively recognized all the substances that not only compose the object but also compose the context of the object, such as its position and the interaction with the adjacent substances. One cannot immediately judge a wood being not a table without context. This is somehow odd to the western style of thinking because westerners can hardly image a situation where a name indeed means nothing until the context of the name must have been well established. In the other words, it is a world that extent suppresses intent.

Unlike the westerners who generally believe objects (in its sense of abstraction) being the fundamental building blocks of the world, for long time the easterners perceive relations being the true construction blocks of the world. The westerners think a noun holding its uniqueness regardless of the application, while the easterners think of a noun indeed with few uniqueness until we recognize its application environment. The easterners think verbs being unique since they describe the ways of tangling while nouns are the things happen to be tangled.

I was born and grown up in China where I was very deeply influenced by the classic eastern philosophies. Then I came to United States continuing my graduate study and work. Till now I have lived in the western society continuously for more than 12 years. Hence I feel myself be eligible to say that Nisbett truly has done a very good job on recognizing a key difference between the eastern and western societies.

From my childhood I am very much interested in and eventually become very familiar to the eastern style of thinking. Later it becomes both a blessing and a curse on me. My classic eastern style thinking allows me to untangle very complicated events that few others can do. On the other hand it often pulls me to situations over-complicated. This contradiction has annoyed me for long time. The book helps understand my own problem better and leads me to some potential solutions as well.

Now let's turn to World Wide Web. As we all know, the Web is designed by and primarily developed in the western society. Therefore, without surprising the Web today is a product of the western style of thinking. Due to this type of thinking the Web today is composed of nouns/objects, no matter whether we view it as a Net, a Web, or a Graph. World Wide Web is a network of objects. Nevertheless, the Semantic Web community, a primary W3C achievement, claims the future of the Web to be more and more a web of data. It means a network of more fine-grained nouns.

Despite of the success of the Web so far, a question is, however, that whether the western style of thinking is the only way that may lead the Web forward. Or, more importantly, will the Web continuously evolve only in the track of this style of thinking? Will it eventually be a bottleneck if we do not start to think of another route for Web evolution?

A problem already starts to emerge. The Semantic Web as a web of data (or a web of objects) is progressed slower than expected, especially when we compare it to the other industry-lead movements such as Web 2.0. The Web seems reluctantly deeper into the realm as a network of nouns. At the same time, the Web becomes more and more active when "services" spread.

Compared to data, a service is closer to be a verb on the Web. Phrases such as "google the term", "amazon the price", "ebay the item" point out that the verbs we created on the Web are very well received by the public. Unlike what Semantic Web perceiving the future of the Web to be a network of more fine-grained nouns, the Web 2.0 movement demonstrates that the Web demands more verbs than nouns in growing. Don't the verbs tell us anything?

We may need to take the eastern style of thinking to think of the Web. But, how? I will continue this topic in the next post in which I discuss how we may learn from the way Apple thinks of the Web.