We’re still at a very early stage of network evolution, although people like Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf and John Perry Barlow have been living the story for years. The internet itself, although a global phenomenon, has only penetrated about one billion users, but there’s another five-and-a-half billion people on Earth. Right now, the net is strongly focused on people-oriented activities, whether it’s email or social network, soon there could be as many as seventeen billion devices on the internet, which is approximately 3 times the amount of people living on the planet. So, for instance, all of our devices, PDA’s, mobiles, computers, televisions, refrigerators, air conditioners, security systems, could all potentially be online. In a device-rich environment, the business opportunity to manage these devices will occur, and subsequently, these devices will begin to interact with each other. The emergence of the “internet of things” is also interpreted and dubbed “spimes” by science fiction author Bruce Sterling to describe a future where all manufactured objects are digitally tagged and linked to extensive information systems to be forever trackable, findable, uniquely identifiable, and generate histories. As objects become aware or “things that think,” waste management will not only become hyper-efficient, but sensory systems and mobile communications will also begin to rely upon shared data and build dynamic meshes, a system where everybody helps everybody else, allowing for devices to communicate locally, ending our dependency upon telecommunications infrastructure or the ubiquitous grid. As networks become a metagesture of expression, where it’s the interaction and aggregate of billions of little gestures that serves to create and maintain whole systems in motion, it’s interesting to see that those ’60s prime green vibes of communal spirit and fellowship have survived. And perhaps, as we move forward in creating our net-centric world, reinventing not only our economy but education and perception, we will begin to see networks and their interrelations everywhere: whether it’s String Theory, dark matter, neurons, or even found, curiously inside, that hippiedrome magical mushroom mycellium.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 9th, 2009 at 6:12 pm by obsrvtry and is filed under N is for Node. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.