Posts Tagged ‘metaphor’

I’ve been struggling to find the right metaphor to describe how the Web has suddenly changed. I don’t think I’ve cracked it but here goes – please let me know what you think.

In my mind’s eye I picture a vast, deep ocean of static, archived content.

Abyssal.

Still.

Vast.

Far above, a sparkling, shimmering layer of light and life and frantic activity. They call it The Pelagic Zone.

At the very top, in the seething surface layer of the Epipelagic the Web is a boiling mass of life. A rising storm of thrashing users. An unimaginably massive number of interactions. The waters are hot. Currents flow fast. Waves crash and spume flies as millions of short messages rip back and forth across the surface. Links and people collide in a foamy chaos of tangling and untangling networks.

The tide of the century is in full flood.

This top layer – the scalding Photic cauldron of short messages and streaming data visualisations – is where it’s at. The top layer has become a lens for finding content further down. The surface is now where I look for new stuff, where I ask questions (search) and where I discover the vast Web of  sites, pages, documents and content hanging lower down in the depths. This layer is connected to that which lurks below through trillions of filaments and capillaries.

Within the Mesopealgic (a thick social layer extending downwards from the Photic into the darkness) is The Web of Blogs. And as you travel deeper and deeper down through our column, through the Bathypelagic, there are bigger, more static, more structured, increasingly siloed and closed websites. Until you hit the vast invisible Web of pages and sites that few visit. They’re down there, you discover them by chance.

Data rains down like nutrients, feeding the whole ecosystem.

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