UPDATE March 2, 2010
Today’s New York Science Times has a terrific article about the shape of the internet. I will be posting more about what the article reports. But for now, let the record show that the final paragraph says about the scale-free (long tail, 6 degrees) network theorists: “What they’re measuring is not the physical network, it’s some virtual abstraction that’s on top of it . . . .” — they are measuring what I have depicted here as the oval. In that oval is the global knowledge commons, emerging as educators tend still to choose to use content created and organized elsewhere.
My last two posts may seem silly: Open Education Resources are a pizza and Schooling is a pizza. Yet they provide a way to see where in a general way the location of the global knowledge commons is — hovering above other layers of what we call education. The intertwingularity is the best name I know for that place. You may be thinking the place — indicated by the oval at the top of the pizzas — is something philosophical and/or metaphysical. But such thoughts are red herrings as we reconfigure education around the internet.
The place represented by the oval is where the meaning of the content of the internet intertwingles. This place cannot be identified as the physical telecosm itself, which is so eloquently described below by George Gilder. Instead, the intertwingularity emerges from the telecosm and gives birth to new phenomena such as the global economy, the blogosphere, and the global knowledge commons.
The place represented by the oval is also not the packets of zeroes and ones zooming around within the telecosm. Inside the oval is where, as the meaning of the packets intertwingles, patterns of ideas arise that a student connected into the internet can learn. The student can interact with those ideas in real time, adding to and/or changing them. That interaction is very real — not philosophical or metaphysical.
When George Gilder wrote this beautiful description of the telecosm, it was in the context that from it “will spring a new global economy.” The oval can be thought of as the location of the economic intertwingling that has revolutionized the global economy since Gilder wrote these words in 1999.
By 2010, most of what is known by humankind is already on the internet, and a lot of it is sufficiently open and unbundled to participate in the intertwingularity. Because network laws govern within the intertwingularity, the ideas there are self-vetting, with the best of them becoming the most linked and thereby emergent.
Imagine gazing at the web from far in space. To you, peering through your spectroscope, mapping the mazes of electromagnetism in its path, the Web appears as a global efflorescence, a resonant sphere of light. It is the physical phase space of the telecosm, the radiant chrysalis from which will spring a new global economy. The luminous ball reflects Maxwell’s rainbow, with each arc of light bearing a signatory wavelength. As the mass of the traffic flows through fiber-optic trunks, it glows infrared, with the network backbones looming as focused beams of 1550-nanometer radiance running across continents and under the seas. As more and more people use wireless means to access the Net, this infrared ball grows a penumbra of microwaves, suffused with billions of moving sparks from multimegahertz teleputers or digital cellular phones. Piercing through the penumbra are rich spikes of radio frequencies confined in the coaxial cables circling through neighborhoods and hooking to each household. Spangling the Net are more than 100 million nodes of concentrated standing waves, each an Internet host, a computer with a microprocessor running at a microwave frequency from the hundreds of megahertz to the gigahertz. The radiance reaches upward between 400 and 800 miles to thousands of low-orbit satellites, each sending forth cords of “light” between Earth and sky in the Ku band between 12 and 18 gigahertz. George Gilder, Forbes ASAP, October 1, 1999
The main section FINDABILITY of Handschooling.com is about the intertwingularity and the crucial role of experts and educators in following network laws to make what they know findable. What is not findable will not intertwingle.
The most elegant aspect of the oval is that we each have one hovering above our own brain. Even more so than Gilder’s “telecosm,” your brain is a magnificently complex network from which ideas emerge. In future learning the intertwingularity emerging from the internet will reflect whatever a person seeks to learn into that person’s own intertwingularity of what he or she knows and thinks.
Let’s get to work and make that so.
