The Evolution of Cyberspace: Virtual Worlds

By Craig Harm

Cyberspace 2020.  What will it be like?  Can we even contemplate what our “web presence” will be like?  Less than ten years ago Facebook, Twitter and MySpace did not exist.  And while they may have seemed to just appear, there was actually a logical evolution to their emergence.  Following and logically extending this evolution may help us postulate how our cyberspace interactions will look ten years from now.

It’s amazing how history can repeat itself, even in cyberspace.

Let’s first look at what may have been the beginning of internet-based direct social interactions, instant messaging (IM).  Peer-to-peer functions like IM and chat started as early as the 1980s with bulletin board based chat.  But it was in the early 1990’s with the modern network connectivity that Internet-wide, GUI-based messaging clients really began to take-off. 

ICQ, AIM (formerly AOL Instant Messenger) and Windows Messenger were just a few examples of this capability.  These services offered similar capabilities allowing users to create profiles, add users as friends, conduct real-time live chats via text services, exchange files and even conduct video chats.  They allowed the development of true, though virtual social networks between people that had perhaps never physically met.

As technological capabilities continued to grow, so too did the evolution of IM.  With the introduction of voice-over-IP (VoIP) new IM services began to take hold.  Systems like Skype and Vonage allowed users to connect to telephones, both landlines and mobile, thus expanding the virtual social network capabilities even further. 

Internet-based social networking began as only something “geeks” did and it was based on generalized online communities such as Theglobe.com (1994),] Geocities (1995) and Tripod.com (1995).  But as the desire, capability and social culture evolved, new methods of social networking emerged.  By the end of the 1990’s, technology was helping to develop more advanced features to meet the growing user need to find and manage friends on-line: to enhance a social network. 

Out of the development of these new social networking methods a new generation of social networking sites began to emerge.  One of the first, Friendster, soon became part of the Internet mainstream.   Followed by MySpace and the professional’s social networking systems, LinkedIn there was a rapid increase in social networking sites' popularity. 

Launched in February 2004, Facebook, a social network service website now with more than 600 million active users, is rapidly becoming symbolic of what internet-based social networking is about.    In Facebook, users create a personal profile, add other users as friends and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile.  Additionally, users may join common interest user groups, organized by workplace, school, or college, or other characteristics.   Facebook, the subject of the recent film The Social Network has garnered our interest, participation and consumed our on-line attention unlike any cyber phenomena, so far. 

Enabled by expansive technological advancements, virtual, highly social worlds are emerging to meet evolving user needs for social interaction.  Second Life (SL), launched in June 2003, is a virtual world accessible through the Web.  Users, called “Residents”, interact with each other through personally created profiles called avatars.  Residents create a personal profile, add other users as friends and exchange messages.  In addition to these functions, which are similar in purpose to Facebook, residents can also explore, meet other residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, and create and trade virtual property and services with one another, or travel throughout the world.   SL is designed on the premise that users can build virtual objects, either fictional or based on real items, and share, trade or sell them throughout the system.

Ever since two computers could be connected together, people have found new ways to compete with each other in games.  Initially just point-to-point, person-to-person, over the last 10-15 years gaming has evolved to connect substantial numbers of players through the Web.  With the emergence of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG), enabled by high-speed networking and Flash- and Java- based technologies, an Internet revolution has occurred where websites can utilize streaming video, audio, and a whole new environment for user interactivity. 

In the last 5 years or so, online gaming has exploded in popularity.  Computer role-playing games in which a very large number of players interact with one another within a virtual game world are running on a constant presence through services such as Xbox Live (23 million members) and games like Runescape (150M) and World of Warcraft (12M).  With so many members, online gaming is a serious cyberspace presence.  When you couple this immense cyber presence with the $5-10 monthly membership fees, MMORPG is also BIG business.

But, like all other technology-enabled cyberspace capabilities there is an evolution on-going.  Powered by concepts discussed previously in these blogs (exchange, emergence and self-organization) online gaming is evolving.  Social networking capabilities which previously required multiple services are routinely “packaged” into on-line gaming systems. 

Enabled through a user-created avatar, players within Xbox Live, World of Warcraft and Runescape can now maintain social contact with friends on-line…in fact, they actually have to maintain and leverage these social networks to achieve objectives in the games they play! 

Text, voice and video chat, status-updates, and profile creation are integral components of these online game systems.  Users no longer need to go to separate individual sites and systems to maintain their social network.  Convergence and coevolution are definitely at work in these environments.

For people though, the real evolution is not the integration of technical capabilities.  It is the emergence of culture acceptance and user comfort with interacting with others inside of virtual worlds.  Today’s younger generation processes an evolved skill set, mental accommodation, and social acceptance of interacting within these virtual worlds.  They are in these worlds every day, for hours at a time. 

For many users, the only interaction they have with some of their friends is within these worlds, where they are maintaining contact and staying informed of real world activities and events.  It is as though there is an overlap for them of the real world and these virtual worlds, and the so-called barriers between them seem to blur through continued presence in virtual environments.

So what do I think Cyberspace 2020 will look like?  Based on this evolution we’ve just discussed, I envision a cyberspace where users will no longer log onto a machine, open multiple applications, and interact with the Web via a browser.  

In 2020, I see us “logging” into the Web through personalized devices directly into our virtual world.  Many of us may even stay logged on constantly!

Acting through personally created profiles (through our avatars), we will interact with our social network just as we would face-to-face.  It’s almost certain that we will even see our avatars empowered with new capabilities that allow them to interact on our behalf, buying movie tickets, making dinner reservations and so on.

Our virtual world will be our interface to the rest of the World Wide Web and people everywhere!  Cyberspace 2020 will likely be even more interconnecting and more social, but it will almost certainly change the way we live, work and play.

Stay connected for more on the impacts of virtual worlds right here in the SENDS blogs.

SENDS 2010: The Year in Review

by Carl Hunt, Bob Schapiro and Craig Harm

In sports, when an underdog team surprises everyone and gets into the playoffs, they can’t wait until the next game.  That’s what the SENDS team is feeling right now: the thrill of anticipation as we see our season extended and the team getting better and better when it counts.

Our goal has always been to empower the public to create the future of cyberspace and become part of the SENDS team.  A few months ago, we were in the odd position of being able to open positions on the team, but not having a lot of people to join.  Now that is changing...fast.

From the beginning, SENDS has been fortunate to enjoy the active participation of great thinkers...including some of the people who actually set the course for the future of the Internet.  Most of these people work for the government and major software firms, hired for their expertise in cyber-security.  But as scientists, they wish to transcend that role and discover what makes cyberspace tick.  They know this can only be discovered by working with the people who use the Internet every day; in short, almost everyone – it’s a big team!

That’s where SENDS comes in.

To be blunt, until a few months ago, our resources for reaching the public were not what we hoped they’d be.  But the seeds we planted started to thrive, growing stronger every day.  With this posting, we have now published 31 blogs in the 3½ months from the first entry.  We’ve been fortunate to be highlighted in several online fora, including James Fallows’ Atlantic Magazine blog, the DoD’s Armed with Science blog, and an interesting site called “OhMyGov!”  We’ve even been invited to two Highlands’ Forum meetings to talk about SENDS and participate in discussions of Design in Cyberspace.

The important thing is that you are reading this blog...and if you’re like most of the people who now read and contribute, six months ago you had no idea what SENDS was.  You joined the team!

In 2011, we look forward to empowering people in many ways, as with our initiative for you to help create the new vocabulary of cyberspace.  In fact, thanks to contributors, we have a lot to build on to strengthen and broaden the team.  As 2010 draws to a close, however, it’s worth talking about the direction the SENDS Pilot project has traveled from its inception and to try to put it into context.  That, along with new team members’ contributions, creates the synergy for 2011.

SENDS began in 2009 as a proposal to address the observations of a December, 2008 US Department of Energy White Paper entitled “A Scientific Research and Development Approach To Cyber Security.”  Thus, SENDS began as a project to address cyberspace security, expanding on several of the thoughts from that very fine DOE paper.

It became clear after a 90-day study, however, that in order for the US and indeed all users of cyberspace to explore and exploit the environment, security was necessary but not a sufficient condition to unleash the potential cyberspace has to enhance prosperity on a national and global scale.  We took this challenge to potential government sponsors and they agreed.

In a June, 2010 interagency, multidisciplinary forum in Arlington, VA, the current SENDS Pilot Project was initiated, identifying four main tasks to accomplish in the 12-month pilot.

As we embarked on the project, new ideas came to light as a result of the collaboration of the diverse SENDS participants.  The SENDS tasks were still relevant, but we found that we needed to look through the lenses of living systems and ecology to develop holistic perspectives about the greatest connecting fabric mankind has known.

Several prominent advisors told us that the ecological perspective is a valuable way to think about the challenges of cyberspace prosperity and security, particularly when considered through the standpoint of what is found in wicked problem resolution literature.  The wicked problem resolution advice is good because it also helps us think about the social context of problem definition and resolution: it’s a people challenge, just as are cyberspace prosperity and security.

We took this good advice and blended it with the thoughts of guest bloggers to produce what we think is an objective viewpoint about how cyberspace is emerging around us and how it will affect us in the future.  We looked at people, processes and technology as a convergent and emergent phenomenon (starting here).  These insights have been continuously informed by multiple perspectives, possible through the connectivity that cyberspace offers.

This holistic view is why SENDS is more than just another cyberspace security project.

Through the efforts of a variety of authors, the SENDS Blog has been fortunate to provide diverse perspectives on the SENDS tasks through several backgrounds…the SENDS wiki site has augmented and expanded these perspectives.

Broad thinking about one of the two most long-term focused SENDS tasks, Education and Academic Curricula, for example, has led to contributions from no less than four authors about this important topic.  We have had the good fortune to hear from a school teacher in Canada, an Emmy-Award winning documentary director/ producer, a director of a nationally recognized science center in Florida and a retired military officer (here and here), each sharing distinctive perceptions about how America must look at education in the connected age.

Another long-term task, a Center for Cyberspace Science, has generated equally important and diverse perspectives, ranging from the use of advanced modeling and simulation capabilities to the development of a “cyberspace laboratory.”  When put into the context of better understanding concepts like community in cyberspace and formulating meaningful inquiry about this new environment, a center for studying the remarkable power of cyberspace connectivity seems mandatory for better understanding this new world.

The task to develop relevant models and simulations (M&S) as a “laboratory” for cyberspace is indeed one of the tasks we have invested considerable resources in.  The SENDS M&S team collected data from a variety of subject matter experts, including military, law enforcement and commercial practitioners to develop SENDSim.  This M&S environment, shown in its early stages here, is one of the first products of the Center.

We are also developing SENDSim to become a useful tool to gain insights on the kind of socio-technological convergence issues we’ve been discussing above.  Speaking of understanding socio-technological convergence, the SENDS team has also been fortunate to publish the insights of a senior media analyst to help clarify challenges to look at cyberspace in this way (here and here).  We’ve even had an innovative software developer write about the development of programming languages in the context of socio-technological convergence and ecology!

Another early product of the Center is a White Paper on the Development of a Science of Cyberspace, that while in early draft form, may serve as a framework for the consideration of important topics to demonstrate how such a discipline would be studied.  We will see more similar products from the Center as the Pilot continues, and we expect to write about them here in this blog.

The first six months of the SENDS Pilot Project have been exciting, and chronicling it within the pages of the SENDS Blog has been rewarding considering the diversity of the authors who have contributed.  The remaining six months of the Pilot should be equally rewarding as we see the maturity of SENDSim emerge.

We look forward to experiencing greater government, commercial, academic and even individual relationships as we improve on the Science White Paper through more diverse input, and synergize SENDS through collaboration with other efforts.  We also look forward to formalizing relationships that move the Center for Cyberspace Science into a suitable home.

In coming weeks, we’ll port over this blog and much of the wiki material to a SENDS-dedicated site at www.sendsonline.org.  We’ll announce the movement of the site in this blog and on the wiki when we’re up and running.  Please visit us there, and continue to send your thoughts to words@sendsonline.org or through comments within this blog.

It’s been a great first six months for the rapidly growing SENDS team and we can hardly wait for the next six.  The playoffs await and the season continues!

Information Operations and Cyberspace: It's “Time” to Chat

By Craig Harm

Last week, Carl Hunt and I had the opportunity to talk about the SENDS effort at the Defining IO/Cyber Spectrum Operations Conference hosted at SPAWAR, Charleston, SC.  The conference was conducted by the Association of Old Crows.  The conference theme was “Defining IO & Cyber Capabilities in 21^st Century warfare”.  Keynote speakers were headlined by Vice Admiral “Mike” McConnell, U.S. Navy (retired) who was previously the Director of the National Security Agency and the Director of National Intelligence.  This was an important conference!

Discussions the first day centered on the strategic issues of DoD and national cyber operations and defense efforts.  While we heard how each of the military services is reorganizing to make cyber operations a more main-stream activity, we also heard about the complexity of their network management and defense challenges.  Senior-level operators expressed their concerns about being unable to see into their own networks.  The speakers included an Army general officer, a reservist on active duty, who has also worked in senior leadership positions in the commercial sector.

Many of the senior-level presenters on the first day talked about their efforts to secure their own networks.  As would be expected from those with such responsibilities, they all seemed to focus on the key areas of management, oversight, accountability, command and control and roles and missions.   These points were highlighted by recurring mention of organizational studies, effectiveness inspections, committee formations and “way-ahead” talks.

The second day was focused more on the “tactical” level and network operations.  A key point about network dependencies was brought up during these discussions.  The upshot of all of the presentations was that despite the talk of Net Centric Operations and Warfare, the DoD is really Net Dependent, and it is this Net Dependency that presents the most opportunities for vulnerability; this creates a driving force behind the requirement for secure networks.   With over 1.4 million DoD users on the network (including an increasing mobile presence), the challenge for network operators is building the culture to ensure users are protecting data and the network.

Yes, despite the leap in technologies and accessibility, it is still a culture issue – a people issue.

Although the details and the content of most of the discussions about Information Operations (IO) were classified, there were some key points of interest we can discuss here.  The first and foremost to me is the incongruence of the definition of Information Operations and what it is composed of.   Even today, there is still debate about what IO is and how it’s done.  The conventional DoD definition of IO includes both electronic warfare (EW) and computer network operations (CNO).   While some of these discussions look and feel “new”, such as computer network operations, the main themes are not, as I point out below.

The third and last day was conducted as a panel forum on new technologies.  The panel members were asked to address “What are some new technologies on the horizon, and how are these technologies transitioned to the warfighter?  What are Cyber and Net-Centric Warfare, and how will these capabilities help the warfighter?”

There were discussions and presentations on adaptive antenna technologies, text and video content extraction, as well as Information Management systems: the technologies of cyber-enabled operations, if you will.  It was in these sessions that Carl presented the SENDS Project.  His was the only presentation of the entire conference to specifically address the need to understand the human part of cyberspace, the linkage between “new” and “old” thinking about Information Operations (see below).

Many of the presentations during the conference alluded to the human element, but none called it out specifically.   In addition to giving a basic overview of the SENDS philosophy and the concept of the Science of Cyberspace, Carl talked of how the biggest source of both gratification and aggravation in the growth of cyberspace is in innovation….persistent, emergent innovation, a human process, by the way.

There is a paradox of sorts, where the ultimate uses of technologies and policies in many cases deviate to a use that was not the original intent.  This, Carl pointed out, is the manifestation of emergence from human, technological and cultural exchanges.  Cyberspace is a breeding ground for adaptation and innovation.  People interacting with other people, often through cyberspace technologies, show us daily how adaptive and yet unpredictable we truly are: this also helps explain why social science, while making progress, still has a long way to go!

After hearing three days of talk about the importance of Information Operations, the tremendous focus and effort within the DoD towards these operations, and the monumental challenges DoD has to overcome to implement them I began to wonder why this seems so new to people.  Information, communication, connectivity and secure lines of communication have historically always been important, vital parts of our lives as humans.

Several in the conference pointed out that during the revolutionary war, it was George Washington’s tremendous human network for gathering information that enabled him to outmaneuver the British and keep the Colonial Army intact.  While moving to intercept Robert E. Lee's army of Northern Virginia, Union soldiers from George B. McClellan's Army of the Potomac discovered a misplaced copy of Lee's detailed battle plans wrapped around three cigars; even though McClellan failed to exploit the discovery to victory, he was still able to achieve a tactical draw at Antietam (interestingly, some of the first “cyberspace” technologies such as the telegraph, linked people during that time).  World War II saw the dependence on wireless transmission, another manifestation of cyberspace.  The Allied exploitation of Japanese codes and the German Enigma machine gave a significant advantage to the Allied war efforts.

So why is there the sudden emphasis on Information Operations?  Why is this different now, in the 21^st Century, than it has been in the past?  Why are these operations drawing so much attention from our national leaders in the last few years?

I believe what is really making this different is rooted in the effects modern cyberspace connectivity brings to operations.  Near-ubiquitous human connectivity and the massive quantities of data, interacting through the technology of cyberspace, have a transformational temporal impact.  It is really about time, and the massive human-human, human-machine and machine-machine interactions that modern, fast-paced flows of information enable.   SENDS is attempting to gain an understanding of these same themes through the study of exchange, emergence and self-organization.

These elements that cyberspace brings to Information Operations makes things different now, more than at any other period in history.  And it is these elements, including the effects of time, through which we must gain a more fundamental understanding before any study, reorganization or new policy will ever have any significant impact.

Cyberspace Community: Yours, Mine or Ours?

by Carl Hunt

Perhaps the biggest source of both gratification and aggravation in the growth of cyberspace is innovation…continuous, emergent innovation: it constantly surprises us!  What we ultimately observe in human, technological and cultural interactions often does not resemble the original purposes we had in mind when we built and deployed cyberspace realizations of our great ideas.  The communities within cyberspace just seem to take over and something new emerges.

Whose communities are these that change our intents and purposes?  Why don’t we have better control over our ideas and creations?  Just who owns cyberspace in the first place and do “they” control these communities?  Why do these emergences keep happening?

We have spoken about emergence in past blogs (here and here, for example), but we haven’t yet discussed it in terms of community, an all-important concept for cyberspace dwellers to accept and adopt.  People, interacting with other people and our technologies, show us routinely how adaptive and often unpredictable we truly are, particularly when we start forming the connected collectives we call community.

Whether these collectives and communities are in the virtual worlds of cyberspace or in the real world (whatever the differences are anymore), who owns them and who governs them?  Do we as humans own cyberspace or does it ultimately own us within the communities we build and occupy?  Could we at least suggest models of how these things work together?

One thing we have seen is that cyberspace is a breeding ground for adaptation and innovation, accelerating the processes of ecological coevolution as we have discussed in the past.  And since we can in fact begin to build models of these interactions, we can see that the outcomes of these adaptations and exchanges are truly emergences.  We can also see that these emergences apply to communities, as well.

SENDS is about leveraging these outcomes of emergence in the context of biological, sociological and technological events.  Emergent behaviors, products or processes are outcomes that are greater than the sums of their parts: the very nature and richness of the interactions that bind together to produce novelty and innovation ensure the amplification of the essential qualities of cyberspace.  Oh yes, emergence is something more than a simple sum of parts.

Cyberspace communities accommodate and reflect emergence in ways that we as humans have simply not been able to visualize before.  Technological innovations are mashed up to produce products not originally conceived, enabling new opportunities and processes for their uses and new communities to embrace and propagate them, and the cycle begins again.  New communities then form and so it goes, on and on…this is emergence in action!

Emergence is empowered by the connectivity of cyberspace in ways no other environment or domain of existence has ever done before, and we can indeed begin to model it, as we suggested (here and here).  But, communities and the dynamism they represent start to really add complexity to the models.  That’s why it’s so hard to say whose community is whose and who really occupies or controls it.

It’s worth trying to struggle with the concept of community within cyberspace, and we are going to do it in these blogs.  We’re going to leverage the insights we gain from the calls for assistance from contributor Bob Schapiro, for example, and find ways to express cyberspace as community, embracing emergence as a concept that reveals rather than obscures. 

We may not answer all the questions raised in this blog today but we’ll answer some of them.  And in keeping with good science, we’ll raise even better and more focused questions that help us explain and predict just what is happening in cyberspace and in community.  We may even reach some level of community sensibility!

Editor's Note: We want to thank Atlantic Magazine correspondent James Fallows for mentioning SENDS and the SENDS blog in a recent piece (noted in the right margin of this blog).  Jim's work in helping people understand the effects of cyberspace and the applications of modern technology have been terrific over the years.  Thanks, Jim!

The Importance of Modeling – SENDSim, Part 1

By Carl Hunt

In the previous blog of 10 September, I offered to provide a graphic to better explain exchange and emergence as these concepts apply to our study of cyberspace and the development of a Science of Cyberspace. Below is that graphic and narrative explanation. This addition also serves as a bridge between discussing the concepts of exchange, self-organization and emergence and the importance of modeling to better understand cyberspace.


We will have a lot to say about modeling and simulation in coming blog entries, and we will hear from the real experts such as Dr. Eric Bonabeau (Icosystem), Dr. David Davis (VGO Associates) and Dr. Greg Amis (Icosystem, and the modeling project lead on SENDS for Eric and Icosystem). All of these experts are significant contributors to SENDS and we will be delighted to hear from them.

Without further adieu, I present our first graphic depiction of exchange, self-organization and emergence as empowered by cyberspace (click image to enlarge).

As shown in the figure, interactions (or exchanges), self-organizing criticality and emergence thus offer us insightful clues as to what we should seek to explain and predict in this new science. If thought of in the sense of some sort of vehicle that moves us from processes to a “final” product, we can visualize the relationship of these components of behavior in cyberspace. Exchange takes place in any environment, of course, but cyberspace as a supporting infrastructure brings the process of exchange to many more people and information transactions around the world.

From this infrastructure, the participants of the exchanges (people, systems and information) self-select and self-organize, again greatly facilitated though the network-based interactions cyberspace empowers. This self-organization process is the transmission that moves exchange into emergence. Absent the unifying body of discipline we propose in the Science of Cyberspace, we are only beginning to visualize the outcome, or product of emergence.

As Morowitz and others have noted, we can only see the emergence after it has happened, but advanced models such as agent-based modeling and simulation, accompanied by evolutionary algorithms, allow us to observe and deduce these potential behaviors through visual interfaces the models provide. These models will likely be the key to better “predicting” emergence in the future. We will be discussing the application of these modeling capabilities to SENDS in much greater detail in future blogs.

While the above figure appears to be a linear movement of information from exchange to emergence, only the beginning and the “end” (the emergence) have relatively fixed points, considering the highly dynamic nature of emergence. As the bottom arrow indicates, the continuous dynamic feedback that is inherent in cyberspace almost ensures nonlinearity will permeate the flow of information. Emergence will lead to more exchange and the process will coevolve and continue.

Exchange and Emergence, Part 2

By Carl Hunt

What of emergence? We posit that emergence is an outcome based on processes and interactions between local nodes (particularly within a social context as it applies to cyberspace), and that this emergence can only be observed in the results of interactions. In hierarchical terms, an emergence is observed “one (approximately) level” above the interacting nodes or components. Biologist Harold Morowitz notes that emergence is manifested in “novel behaviors,” based on properties of the system or whole. “They are novelties that follow from the system rules but cannot be predicted from properties of the components that make up the system,” Morowitz writes (The Emergence of Everything, Oxford, NY, 2002).

In nature, Morowitz continues, emergence is a pruning action leading to the rise of the actual from the possible, and that these rules of nature that accommodate emergence are among the least understood of any science, but will in fact “be a major feature of the science of the future.” To reach its full potential, the Science of Cyberspace will have to make progress in helping us understand emergence and how we might better “predict” it. For that reason alone, emergence must be considered one of the two critical components to explore in this new discipline. The role that self-organizing criticality plays in these emergences is also important to consider, particularly in the massive connecting environment of cyberspace.

Individuals and collectives are connected more deeply, synchronously and asynchronously, and capable of generating more shared knowledge than at any point in the past. Consequently, the processes of exchange have evolved through the maturing of a set of rules and the interactions between “local” socio-technical “nodes” increasingly accommodated by connectivity that cyberspace now makes possible. In emergence, local nodes interact according to their own rules to create a global behavior, where such behaviors are typically very difficult to predict as explained by Morowitz.

Exchanges of information, goods and services take place more rapidly and through more connections than thought possible even a generation ago. A significant consequence of this new level of connectedness is that we lack an understanding of what this exchange-based “social” nature of cyberspace means to our recent history and all other forms of science and technology – we simply have not sufficiently studied cyberspace and the hyper-connectivity it empowers.

Connected collectivity, a concept dated to at least the early studies of physics and biology, changes things and produces cascading effects in many aspects of life we do not yet appreciate. It took decades and centuries to work out the sciences of the physical environments as we understand them today and we expect it will take many years to do the same for cyberspace.

Connected collectivity describes a characteristic of cyberspace related to shaping the environment through relevant network connections (people and organizational networks vice computer networks). As an example, cyberspace enables emergent “basins of attraction” that pull relevant thought or key people in potentially desired directions without human intent or interaction – it can be very subdued in appearance.

Stuart Kauffman described the interactive essence and outcome of this notion of collected connectivity. In Kauffman’s model, visualize randomly picking up two buttons and connecting them with a thread. Continue to randomly pick up buttons and connect them, and eventually buttons will surface that are already connected to one or more buttons. Before long, the majority of buttons are connected in one large “collective” and around the ratio of 0.5 threads to buttons, a phase transition occurs in which there is a single, very large connected collective of buttons.

Through these random processes of connecting (that could just as easily take place through exchanges), emergent structure forms through simple rules.

One of this larger collective’s dynamics is to connect and enable exchange and interactions that were not possible before the phase transition began, thus the emergent structure of the connectedness itself is a significant feature of connected collectivity. This is a powerful concept that drives much of the work in contemporary network (e.g., graph) theory (see for example, Barabasi, Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else, Penguin, NY, 2003).

The study and modeling of emergence will be essential to understand connected collectivity because its structure can be so transparent as to be invisible to conventional network thinking.
If emergence can ever be controlled and thus predicted, it likely will be through better understanding and articulation of the rules of exchange and the interconnecting frameworks that empower the process of exchange and self-organizing criticality. The effects of these rules on emergence are filtered through many other factors within cyberspace that may or may not be controllable (or even knowable), but the rules we could uncover and with which we could experiment are primarily man-made or natural laws and thus potentially observable and capable of contributing to a better understanding of emergence.

The observance of emergence must be a fundamental object of study within this new science. Bak said that emergence is essentially the outcome of interactions where the results “are not observable consequences of the underlying dynamical rules.” Put another way by Morowitz: “Emergence is the opposite of reduction. The latter tries to move from the whole to the parts…The former tried to generate the properties of the whole from an understanding of parts.” Exchanges, self-organization and emergence thus offer us insightful clues as to what we should seek to explain and predict in this new science of cyberspace.

This is thus an important driving factor behind why we should do SENDS and why we so greatly need a “Science of Cyberspace.” Look for a graphic depiction of these concepts soon, right here in these blogs…