Collectivism on the Web

Collectivism emphasizes on human interdependence and the importance of collective. As probably the greatest collective project of mankind in history, World Wide Web engages enormous practices of collectivism. In this article, we take a brief look at several typical examples of these engagements.

Collective Intelligence

Collective intelligence is the most well-known engagement of collectivism on World Wide Web. In particular, Web 2.0 advocates have declared "harnessing collective intelligence" to be the touchstone of the Web 2.0 revolution. By definition, collective intelligence is a form of intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals. If someone feels a little bit puzzled of this definition, here is an alternative explanation that is imprecise but much easier to be understood. Informally, collective intelligence on the Web is the collections of user generated "intelligence".

A keen reader may immediately find an interesting comparison: are there any differences between user generated "intelligence" and user generated "content" (or user generated "data")? On Web 2.0, we have almost mentioned users generation content (UGC) as many times as collective intelligence. In many people's mind, UGC almost equals to the collective intelligence. But the actual meanings between "intelligence" and "content" or "data" are very much different. The intent of "intelligence" is much richer than "content/data". Tim O'Reilly also had briefly mentioned this distinction in one of his earlier post about harnessing collective intelligence.

Content/data is a type of intelligence but at the low end. Jean Piaget, a Swiss philosopher and pioneer of the constructivist epistemology, had a compact description about intelligence: "Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do." Content/data provides shallow and unrefined information for people to use. Content/data is often too crude to be efficiently used. Keeping the user generation intelligence at the level of content/data is not enough. This is a problem.

I foresee that the degree of complexity (as well as the degree of efficient usage) of the collective intelligence on the Web is going to evolve with the Web. For example, by tagging content with formal labels that are defined by ontologies, the user generated content/data would evolve to be the user generated knowledge. This is exactly what the vision of Semantic Web wants to bring to us. Moreover, by augmenting formally labeled content with external logic routines, the user generated knowledge would evolve to be the user generated wisdom. By encoding the mechanism of proactiveness into machine computation, the user generated wisdom might evolve to be the user generated creativity. By engaging user generated content/data, knowledge, wisdom, creativity together, we might eventually get the user generated personality, through which the human evolution reaches a new stage of being artificially immortal. Is this path a long way? Yes, there is a long way to go. Is this path an impossible dream? No, it is not. The practice of collective intelligence is converting our society into a virtual world simultaneously from the level of individuals and the level of collective groups.

Collective Behavior

Collective intelligence is not the only practice of collectivism on the Web. Another key practice of collectivism on the Web is the implementation of collective behavior.

Collective behavior is very much difference from collective intelligence. All types of collective intelligences are static and thus they can be easily presented in an explicit way. In comparison, collective behaviors are dynamic and it is difficult to present them in an explicit way. As the result, collective behaviors are much harder to be used than collective intelligences on the Web though in fact at the same time the amount of collective behaviors is much greater than the amount of collective intelligences. The reason of this amount difference is indeed trivial. Every piece of collective intelligence on the Web must be related to at least one human behavior (i.e. the one action that post this piece of information online). The majority of the time, any piece of collective intelligence must be associated with many human behaviors such as reading and writing. With such a large pool of collective behaviors, it is surprising to see that so few actions have been made so far to manage and utilize this large pool.

Fortunately, Web researchers have started to pay their attention to the collective behaviors. The recent proposal of the implicit web is a typical example. The implicit web is a network that defragments every piece of implicitness on the explicit web. The majority of the implicitness on the Web actually belongs to the collective behaviors.

Collective Responsibility

The collective intelligence is a popular concept. The discussion of collective behavior is also not rare. But the rest of practices of collectivism on the Web I am going to discuss are indeed uncommonly. Many readers may not even hear of them before. But all these practices are unexceptionally important and valuable for the evolution of World Wide Web. The first one I introduce is the collective responsibility.

Collective responsibility is a concept, or doctrine, according to which individuals are to be held responsible for other people's actions by tolerating, ignoring, or harboring them, without actively collaborating in these actions. This concept is particularly important to the study of Internet security.

On the age of Web 2.0 and afterwards, security is no longer a solo issue with the deeper and wider implementation of collectivism. As a result, being innocent may no longer be simply taken as an individual issue. We must start to consider collective responsibility, i.e., some people may have to be punished not due to their own guilty but because they have not actively prohibited the guilty happened regularly in their participated societies. This issue is going to be very much debatable and exciting.

Collective Identity

A collective identity refers to individuals' sense of belonging to a group.

Identity is a tough issue on the Web. Normally, a web user may have varied identities on different sites. These varied identities, however, cause serious problems when people try to organize their information of interest across the boundaries of web sites. To address this problem, web researchers have issued the project OpenID that allows users to use a single ID over the entire Web.

But OpenID, even if it would be a standard over the Web, is not the end of the Web identity issue. Similar to that individual persons have their particular roles in real life, individual identities on the Web must gain their particular social roles in virtual life. The identification of these roles is particularly important when we would start to manipulate human generated information on the Web, i.e. collective intelligence, collective behaviors, etc. Only until humans or machines may identify the social roles of the information producers or owners, these humans or machines may be able to properly manipulate the information. The research of collective identity will focus on the identification of social roles of individual identities.

The collective identities are identities of identities. The study of this issue is another exciting and unexplored field that may cause much attention in the future.

Collective Consciousness

Collective consciousness refers to the shared beliefs and moral attitudes which operate as a unifying force within society. In the other words, the collective consciousness is about machine morality because human consciousness on the Web is handled by machines. The machine morality is not a sci-fi term; this issue is indeed real. Machine morality is the reflection of human morality onto the virtual world.

The implementation of collective consciousness is very much related to all the previously mentioned collective factors. Human consciousnesses are materialized on the Web as static intelligence and dynamic behaviors. Moreover, the collective identities assign social roles for the materialized consciousnesses. The integrity of these materialized consciousnesses is closely related to the level of collective responsibility that is maintained at the meantime. The combination of all these issues compose the intent of the machine morality.

Collective Effervescence

Collective effervescence is a perceived energy formed by a gathering of people as might be experienced at a sporting event, a carnival, a rave, or a riot. This energy can cause people to act differently than in their everyday life.

Collective effervescence is the emotion web site owners want to bring. Collective effervescence represents one word---hype! Collective effervescence is the ultimate goal of implementing collectivism on the Web. At the same time, how much an implementation of collectivism successfully brings collective effervescence into a web site is the fundamental standard that we can measure the quality of the implementations of collectivism. This concept encloses the entire set of collective factors and upgrades the evaluation of collectivism into the computational realm.

Summary

We have discussed several examples of how we may engage practices of collectivism onto the Web. Certainly there could be many other possible practices that are beyond this article. But one thing is certain. Collectivism is a crucial phenomenon on the evolving Web. The study of collectivism on the Web is going to be a critical issue of the Web Science.

The Implicit Web

(This article is cross-posted at ZDNet's Web 2.0 Explorer.)
(watch the article also in Chinese, translated by the author)

Implicit web is a new concept coined in 2007. Due to the first Defrag conference right now, discussion of this new term is timely.

Generally this concept implicit web intends to alert us a fact that besides all the explicit data, services, and links, the Web engages with much more implicit information such as which data users have browsed, which services users have invoked, and which links users have clicked. This type of information is often too boring and tedious to be human readable. So, inevitably, this type of information is only implicitly stored (if stored) on the Web. The implicit web intends to describe a network of this implicit information.

Implicitness Everywhere

Implicit information is everywhere. Implicit information on the Web is about things to which human web users have paid attention. For example, it is about which web pages are frequently read, how often they are read, and who read them. It is also about which services are frequently invoked, how often they are invoked, and who invoked them. Consider the number of web users and how many activities everybody has done daily on the Web, the amount of implicit information must be astonishing. The implicit information co-exists with every web page, every web service, and every web link. In short, great amount of implicitness co-exists with every little piece of explicitness on the Web.

Implicit does not mean insignificant or unimportant. By contrast, implicit web information is often valuable and even crucial in various situations. For example, implicit information of click rates can help editors decide which news are the most popular ones and thus they should put these news on the front page. In similar, the same type of implicit click rates can help salespeople decide which merchandises are among the greatest demanding and so they can arrange the next supply line.

Many companies have already started to collect implicit information and they take benefits from it. Alex Iskold had written a compact introduction on how some companies have utilized implicit information in their products. One well-known example is Amazon.com, which always lists related buyer recommendations with each of its online merchandise. "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought," many readers must be familiar to this label. And more importantly, many web users do care of the content underneath this label. This is a typical example of how implicit web information helps.

Amazon is not the only company that benefits from implicit information. Amazon is not one of the few companies that benefit from implicit information. In fact, nowadays almost every website that sells something, from baby toys to cars, has some back-end mechanism on analyzing the traffic (a typical implicit information) and adjust their sales plan based on the analysis. Implicitness is indeed everywhere.

Connect Implicitness

Implicitness is everywhere, but is fragmented everywhere. Implicit information on the Web is not connected. This is a problem.

Until now, implicit web information is generally separately stored, typically by individual companies. For example, both Gap.com and jcrew.com have their own stored visitor history but not shared to the other, although we may imagine that this information must be well connectible since both companies sell apparel and accessories. Someone may argue that Gap and J. Crew are competitors. So let us switch the pair to be Banana Republic and Victoria's Secret. The products of these two companies are well complement (in contrast to compete) to each other. But still the implicit information is isolated to itself, despite that both sides can benefit by connecting this independent implicit information. Readers can find many more this type of examples.

If sharing implicit information among big companies is still questionable (because these big boys hardly believe that they could get help from their little sisters), this type of sharing is much more critical to small websites. There are numerous individual sites that cannot utilize themselves well enough from their own implicit information because they are too small in size. At the same time, however, there are no effective way for them to share and find helpful implicit information, though everybody knows that there is plenty of this information on the Web.

All these discussions lead to one demand: we need the implicit web, which is not there yet. The goal of the implicit web is to defragment all the fragments of implicitness (where the name Defrag is gotten for the conference). But how can we indeed connect all the different types of implicitness on the Web to be a coherent implicit web? This is a grand challenge to the newly formed community of implicit web research. We do not have a clear answer yet.

No matter whatever, however, the solution to the question must be beyond web links. The implicit web engages with complex types of semantics. The amount of information on the implicit web is gigantic. The implicit Web is also very much dynamic. The traditional model of web link is too simple, too shallow, and too static to deal with all these challenges at the same time. We need big, creative thoughts to store and link all the implicitness.

The greatest potential problem to the implicit web is privacy. To companies, some implicit information may be too confidential to be shared. To individual persons, some implicit information may be too private to be public. We need innovative methods of privacy control on the implicit web.

Implicit Web in nutshell

In summary, I briefly list my beliefs about the implicit web.

1. The implicit web is a network that defragments every piece of implicitness on the explicit web, which is the generally known World Wide Web itself.

2. If the explicit web reveals the static side of human knowledge through posted data, services, and links, the implicit web reveals the dynamic side of human knowledge by recording how users access these data, services, and links.

3. The explicit web engages collective human intelligence. The implicit web engages collective human behaviors.

4. The implicit web is not part of the Semantic Web, but they are closely related. If the Semantic Web constructs a conceptual model of World Wide Web, the implicit web constructs a behavior model of World Wide Web.