Introduction
Within the text of Bridging Physics and Communications: Experimental Detection and Analysis of Web Site Users’ Paths in an Environment of Free Choice, the thesis I wrote in 2000 for my master of arts degree in journalism, I embedded seven essays that each stand alone, yet work together to present the thoughts underlying the thesis itself. These essays originally served as the content appearing in the test Web site.
This is the sixth essay.
Essay
Living systems develop complex and responsive ways of engaging their environments.
One commonplace canard of every freshman biology class is the observation that living creatures respond to external stimuli. But external stimuli, by definition, come from the environment. So one can extend the observation to say that living creatures respond to their environments. Biology classes in most places also teach that over time living creatures, when considered as species, tend to evolve more nuanced and diversified responses to their environment. But a species can also be viewed as a system of creatures distributed in time. So again, one can extend the observation to say: “Living systems develop complex and responsive ways of engaging their environments.”
If one considers the system comprising people and their technology, one can see many of the same characteristics, in the behavior and development of this system, as one sees in the development and behavior of any other living system. For example, when the researchers at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) were developing innovative approaches to personal computing in the era of mainframe computing, they saw the need for a much more highly developed visual display. Their thesis was that the eye was the fattest pipe for communicating information to the person from the computer. So their earliest designs virtually cannibalized the central processor unit time of other subsystems to provide the monitor with the processing time it needed:
[Charles] Thacker’s inspiration was to shift the bottleneck from the memory to the processor itself. In his design, only the CPU, which after all was the most important component of the machine, would be permitted to address the main memory at any time…. [Thacker realized] he could convert idle blocks of the Alto’s main memory into a bitmap for the display screen…. Without this sort of artfulness the Alto display would not have been possible at all (Michael Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age, New York: HarperBusiness, 1999, p. 172-174.).
One can see a subtle and sophisticated give-and-take between people and computers at work here. The evolutionary human preference for engaging the environment visually drove computer designers to modify computers, making them visual to make them personal. In turn, the notion of the desktop metaphor mapped a common human (or at least a common Western) experience onto the computer screen, replicating an aspect of the physical environment in everyday life in the visual environment of the computer-human interface.
You could build on the user’s existing strengths and aptitudes. Knowing something about how to organize a file cabinet would help you organize our digital files, just as being familiar with how trash cans work would help you delete files. The metaphors would make the user experience more intuitive, and the playful, graphic metaphors made the idea of using a computer less intimidating. If you could sit at a desk and shuffle papers, you could use the machine (Steven Johnson, Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate, New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 1997, p. 48.).
Likewise, as the screens and peripherals for computers develop to better produce visual and now audible information for people, people have begun to make sense of their world in ways shaped by the medium of the computer. This is part of what Richard Coyne meant when he wrote, “We are shaped by our technologies as much as we fashion them” (Richard Coyne, Designing Information Technology in the Postmodern Age: From Method to Metaphor, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1995, p. 7.).
What we see happening in us and around us as we and our technology influence one another is the evolution of a complex system. While one could disassemble this system into its constituent components—people, computers, networks, information and the environment—there remains value in considering the system in its complexity. As one does this, one sees that people and their communications technologies together exhibit the characteristics of an evolving species.
This process of shared human and technological evolution is like biological evolution. It happens within an identifiable system, environmental engagement plays a role, and adaptive changes tend to perpetuate themselves, while maladaptive ones die off. The distinction is that the system includes the behaviors of people, the capabilities of technology, and the information upon which they both base their interactions. Another glaring difference is the pace at which the system comprising people and technology is co-evolving.
But despite the differences, the metaphor of “system,” when applied to people and their communications technology, works well. The metaphor highlights the similarities and differences between technological and biological systems evolution. These distinctions illuminate the actions and paths of the human-technological system over time. The connections highlighted by the metaphorical comparison are more than merely rhetorical, in the commonplace sense of the word. The connections show the linkages inherent in the notion of a living system. That is, the metaphor works because the same process goes on in the two systems connected by the metaphor.
And so, whether one looks at the system of a forest and its trees, or the system of the Internet and its people, computers and information, one can draw the same conclusion: Living systems develop complex and responsive ways of engaging their environments.
NOTE: Recent developments point to the possibilities that complex robots can evolve. Early results from the GOLEM Project (Genetically Organized Lifelike Electro Mechanics) indicate that self-evolving robots can develop the characteristic of self-locomotion, a step on the path of life. Hod Lipson and Jordan B. Pollack, “The Golem Project: Automatic Design and Manufacture of Robotic Lifeforms; available from http://golem03.cs-i.brandeis.edu/index.html; Internet; accessed 2 September 2000.
UPDATE: Site referenced above now appears at http://www.demo.cs.brandeis.edu/golem/; Internet; accessed 23 July 2009.