Internet and Ants: How are they similar?

So our last post discussed IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) and the concept of phenotropic development… What?? Put in simple terms, both of these terms will help Web 3.0 develop into a platform where users (Ex. Consumers and businesses) will likely move into an increasingly social relationship. Pretty cool right? Just nod in agreement…

Now what is even cooler is the concept of stigmergic collaboration! “Stigmergy” is a biological term first introduced by French biologist Pierre-Paul Grasse and it describes environmental mechanisms for coordinating the work of independent actors. It is basically a form of self-organization that allows distinct actors to product complex and intelligent structures without planning, controlling or even communicating directly. An example of stigmergic collaboration in the natural world is when ants leave pheromones to exchange information and create trails.

  

By now you are probably asking yourself what does stigmergic collaboration have to do with the technology? Well, the answer is surprisingly simple. The World Wide Web (Yes, the Internet we use every single day to read the news, update our Facebook status, pick our Fantasy League team, etc.) is the first form of stigmergic communication for people. If we relate back to our ant example, people use weblog links ("pheromones") to establish information paths between different users.

Is everything on the web considered to be “stigmergic collaboration”? Nope. For instance, e-mail does not count as stigmergic collaboration because e-mails can only be read by the senders and receivers on either end of the e-mail. Although I’m not so sure how true this is considering the recent NSA scandals but will leave that out for another post... To sum up, stigmergic collaboration must have messages that can be read by everybody on the World Wide Web and it is a extremely powerful tool!

 

We mentioned the ants and weblog example but do we have anything else? Of course! Think of Google and every time you conduct a search on it. The results are displayed based on Google’s PageRank and this is stigmergic collaboration. The links on the results page act as “pheromones” left by users and every time we click on a link we “create a trail”. The more we click on a link, the more we use the trail and the more we engage on stigmergic collaboration. 

 

Now to conclude, I want to leave you with four major points from Mark Elliot, a well-respected scholar when it comes to stigmergic collaboration. You can view some of his work at http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/03-elliott.php. 

1) Collaboration is dependent upon communication, and communication is a network phenomenon. 

2)  Collaboration is inherently composed of two primary components, without either of which collaboration cannot take place: social negotiation and creative output.

3)  Collaboration in small groups (roughly 2-25) relies upon social negotiation to evolve and guide its process and creative output.

4)  Collaboration in large groups (roughly 25-n) is dependent upon stigmergy.