Aims & Objectives

It is your Internet – the result of the independent actions of users. But how many users think ‘about the Internet’, rather than just using it? 

To all intents and purposes the Web is Chaos, populated by millions of individual users, each with his/her own unique purposes and priorities. Yet out of this primordial soup has emerged an ecosystem of islands of coherence, large and small, strong and weak. There are search engines (Google manages to attract 85% of all web searches – now that’s coherence!), social networks (Facebook users spend over three thousand man-years there each day – each user logs on for a daily average of 27 minutes), spam mail and viral marketing, and other phenomenon; e-Bay has spawned tens of thousands of one-person trading companies, not to mention e-mails, the numerous scams, the million and one innovations most of which slide back into oblivion, and so much more.

Such phenomena are quite fascinating, worthy of study in themselves – not only by academics and other ‘professionals,’ but also by ordinary users, most of whom are operating in the dark. Web Coherence is a movement that sets out to create a community of user-investigators who are willing to help each other by sharing knowledge. Our investigators are intent on becoming increasingly aware of the creatures (the carnivores and herbivores ) that are roaming this ecosystem.

Just how a mass of incoherent user-behaviour can coalesce into stable phenomena, and how some fall apart and return to chaos (the Internet Bubble comes to mind,) is a permanent source of wonder, and is screaming out for experimentation. If we can encourage  a large number of people to volunteer just a small amount of time in experimenting, we could achieve substantial data collection.

This blog will start by describing some tools that will prove useful for observing the exotic creatures inhabiting this environment, some experiments to get members started, and it will also act as a place to notify members of their findings.

But we also call on users to submit their own tools and ideas, with the objective of creating a critical mass of experimenters.