Reflection and Meaning on the Web

Most people have heard of the conscious and subconscious mind.  Your conscious mind is the part of your mind you have conscious access to.  Your sub-conscious mind is the part of your mind that you don’t.  Below, I show you how this is mirrored in the web.

The web’s subconscious mind concerns the intelligence that is mined from what people do, without them necessarily knowing it.  This is often done through taking large amounts of search data, and finding interesting patterns in it.  Also, if it’s a site you buy from, then places like Amazon put you into various groups based on your choices and recommend what other people in your groups have chosen.

A lot of times things are done both consciously and subconsciously.  What unites consciousness and subconsciousness?  Two things:  Reflection and Meaning.  We consciously reflect on on what we are doing unconsciously, and we finding meaning with it.

Web 2.0 (the interactive and collaborative web) becomes Web 3.0 (the semantic web or the web of meaning) when it begins to reflect on itself and gives meaning to itself.  And, this is what we are doing when we mark up what we  create with semantic meta-data…such as tagging.

Web 2.0 will become Web 3.0 more and more when meaningful reflection (and the resulting meta-data) becomes a first class citizen of our content.  Meaning allows information to be leveraged in creative new ways.  So, there are some very exiting developments to come, and I definitely want to be part of that.

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My Background – Part 2: Symposium…

I spent a great deal of the rest of my younger life in computers. I ran an electronic bulletin board system (BBS) called Symposium. Before the Internet became mainstream nerds would beg their parents for a second phone line, and run BBS software that monitored it. Then other nerds would use something called terminal programs to call these lines. The BBS software would pick up and allow the user to remotely use it. BBS software was an extremely customizable menu-driven environment that contained a lot of the things that the web contains today, such as: discussion boards, games, chat rooms, and polling.

Symposium was a BBS devoted to philosophy. I got the name from one of Plato‘s dialogs that I later found out contained a lot of sordid details that I guess were over my head at the time I read it. It was a relatively successful BBS, given that I lived in a rural location that was a pay call for most people. I had a great deal of fun with it, and it proved that teenagers are not lazy…they just aren’t challenged. Most of my users were teenagers and I was one of the few BBSes that didn’t have porn and pirated software to download. Users actually logged in for the philosophical discussions that I seeded with whatever questions that popped into my mind about spirituality, ethics, the mind, ect… Fortunately, since these types of topics are the ones that my mind goes to unbidden just about any time it can (even when it shouldn’t), I had no trouble coming up with topics. And, my users contributed qualitative content either on their own or as a response to what I wrote.

Incidentally, it should be stated that these BBSes were the first pieces of software to do the online collaborative user-generated content that is now attributed to Web 2.0 (but, which probably preceded Web 1.0).

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