The Broken WEB

It is just that I have been intrigued by the divisions I see around in life and how the mind thrives in these divisions. Divisions are dangerous and we are seeing it everyday in politics, office and even among us in friends, family. Humans have this penchant for dissecting and making sense. Dissecting is a double edged sword. It can be used as a tool to analyze and at the same time, it can arouse passions and lead you into unwanted confusions. The problem is a weak mind cannot know the difference between when it ended the analysis part and when it entered the realm of the unwanted. This sounds like philosophy right?

I see the same thing in software. Microsoft, Google, Apple all have been delivering this so called Apps which are divisive. They focus on a single function. They deliver that effectively with a great looking UI/UX (the Apple way). They go on developing the Apps like this, millions and zillions.

Now compare this to the WWW of the past when it originated. It was a beautiful, marvelous discovery in my opinion. Hyper links unified the way you read documents. Even today, unless you watch yourself, you can get thoroughly lost in your browsing. I have seen this happen with me many times. I do not know why or how I ended up reading a page which was never what I started with. Hyper links unified the sea of documents.

Unfortunately the documents are a weak form of representing things. It caters to the form and loses the underlying structure from where it originated (the databases). In the quest to present in a form that is readable, the documents lose vital information. Thus the very strength brought in by the hyper linking which links documents breaks mysteriously because there are these finer things in the documents which cannot be linked to precisely.

With time as the documents started representing not merely some text, but company financials, books, weather and so on, the hyper link broke and Google came in :-) Google emerged as the great leveler, the one that fixes the breakage. It brought in search which kind of fixes the hyper link problem indirectly.

I will give you an example, I look for 'lambda calculus', then I find the profile of the lecturer, OK I find a link and I go to his page, then I find some other subjects, say 'Haskell' which are mentioned there and get interested, but I cannot go to them. I go to Google and look for those. Google has figured out the linking between these disconnected pages and it has allowed me to browse again with a brief interruption. You may think it is brief. But I feel it is really annoying. I use a App (Google) to fix my linking when it should have been possible for the lecturer to have linked it or for that matter if it was publicly editable it should have been done by some one. But how does the lecturer know the web site that has the information about 'Haskell' without doing a search? Why was this not solved by the inventors of the WWW which seems vital for the hyper links to function? OK if I do not want to go there, I will have to still answer how will the lecturer or some one else know which web site to link?

I feel the only way is when you have the web itself converted from the web of documents to the web of things. Things are not just data or text. They embody the description about the data as well. They carry meaning. One aspect of describing a thing is also the 'categorization' of the thing as to where it belongs to in a hierarchy of things in the world. If only we had a web of things, then it was fairly easy for the lecturer or any one to look for things that belong to the category of functional programming and find pages of Haskell categorized there and be able to make that Hyperlink.

This way, the web would have remained powerful and would have been a truly knowledge base of the human beings or in short the collective consciousness of us. But as history would want it, we had a more ugly way of fixing this by giving the rights to fix this to the great company called Google. I admire them as they probably were truly annoyed by this breakage as well and looked to answer this sincerely.

However, I feel the root cause is in the way we create things. It was form based and not structure based. It was about putting up a document in the human cognizable way and leaving it for Google to discover it than being able to present the underlying structure. Form falls into the Apple space. That is what they mastered and took it very far. And many others followed. But Form is as I said very divisive. It caters to the human mind very well. It allows you to see things distinctly without a way to know that underneath every thing is related to one another. Form destroys structure in the process of delivering something comprehensible for the human mind. I am not against forms. I feel they are good, but not to the extent where they can destroy the underlying structure of things nor the connection between the things.

I see this world crafted by these two big companies. On one side is Apple which has focused on Form , brought App store, zillions of Apps to cater to every need of you not allowing to realize the connectivity across these sea of Apps because they focused on the Form and make you focus on the Form.

On the other hand, we have Google which is helping you relate the underlying structure, but in the process it did it in a way allowing the lazy human way of typing text for everything and destroying the underlying structure. It did the grunt work of analyzing things and allowing the humans to continue in their realm of text or Form which they are comfortable with.

Thus one has blatantly sidelined with the Form and another has not looked at alternate means and allowed things to continue as is. The net result is, we have a BROKEN WEB and that continues.

I believe the original inventor of the web had realized this in some sense and brought in the Semantic Web and all the W3C work that followed it. However, what they miss is that the damage has happened and I see light only in the micro formats. But that is not again going to be seen as important for a long time to come by the web authors as it looks too late into the game and there are already zillions of web pages without them.

Coming back to philosophy, the divisiveness has to be fixed within. Because it originated within you. That does not mean you stop seeing forms and only see the underlying structures and connections. You will still divide. You will still see forms. But now you are with the awareness that you are dividing and you are admiring the form. The awareness is not something that is turned on in a day for people who had been dividing and seeing things for long. The awareness was there and is there and always there. It has just got faded over time and has remained muted. The realization that divisions are a property of the mind and it should be done only when needed is the awareness aspect of it. With awareness, practice is needed to glide through life's challenges that forces you to be divisive. With awareness one has to watch the divisions happening around. Being in steadfast awareness is the key. It is harder than a small reed withstanding a whirlwind. It is the way and the only way for living. A unified YOU is the goal. Then it is easier to drop YOU.

We have applied our divisive mind to designing the WEB. The spread of apps or the searching of documents is a testimony to that. By raising the awareness level of the WEB which represents the collective consciousness of all of us, we bring a seamless connected web without the distractions of the Apps, but not ignoring them altogether for the function and focus they bring in to solve the problems. A cohesive WEB is the goal. Then it is easier to drop YOU.

PS: I have voluntarily not added any hyper links in the above text to maintain that the web is broken. I have added tags though to show that that is the way to go forward, though it is not going to solve the mess we are already in.