Web Ecologists wanted
Flash mob pillow fight
So far on Web Coherence we’ve been exploring many different phenomena. Web vigilantism, twitter clatter, the trail of online activity, and some of our earlier work on email spam exploration – that we still want you to perform, by the way.
But that’s what it’s been about so far – exploration. We have talked about the phenomena, and gotten a few of you involved in the conversation. But we haven’t taken the other part of this story to fruition yet. And that is the role of the active web ecologist. Part of our mission is to do more than just comment on the coherent behaviour that comes out of the web – it is to study it actively, to use the massive resources of our activated minds to see really what is going on. And of course, maybe we can give these web creatures a little prod from time to time, just to see how they react!
So what does this mean? It means we want you to participate. Read our experiments, and send us your data – we promise that even if you accidentally give us something of value (like your IP, name, email address, etc.) we will not use it or keep it. Suggest your own experiments – what we want is kick-start a community of self-motivated ecologists who think this sort of thing is cool. Those who think that if, one day an internet-flash-mob of ecologists all decide to check certain preferences in snazzy-web-retailer-A’s marketing profiles, it would be cool to see what the reaction is, how things happen from there. How do we as individual humans, acting in a coherent group (a mob!), affect the internet?
But to get there – well, it’ll be a long journey. So sign up – become a web ecologist. Propose experiments, listen to ours, send feedback, spread the word. We want to tweak this internet and see how it reacts – it is not just the commercial world’s creature anymore.
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