How the web is designed (application function and web design) guides us through the web in the way functional architecture or city planning might. Obviously art and aesthetics tend to be a big part of what is considered to be good architecture, or city planning for that matter, so I think that supports the argument that creative expression is an essential component of success. I would like to imagine that the really creative and superbly functional stuff does tend to rise to the top.

In Lessig’s model Law, Norms, Market, Architecture all interact with and influence the evolution of society. The world of internet software is for better or worse wrapping us in a layer through which we interact with everything/everyone, and I like how one blogger diagrammed that distinction here: http://metamemos.typepad.com/e/2004/03/law_norms_marke.html
I haven’t thought sufficiently long on this but it seems to me the answer to your concern is that the technology enables the architecture, which is where our creativity and art, call it humanity, come into play. I’m sure we’ve barely seen the beginning of human expression via the web.

I met some nice people through Librivox. I don’t know that many people who share many of my interests, so that was good, but more important than that was that LibriVox allowed me to lurk silently and see how people were interacting before I interacted myself. Because I was not physically there I did not feel like I had any obligation to contribute. And all the conversations I was listening to (so to speak) were public, so I was not eavesdropping. So, forum-style socialising has some advantages over ‘real’ socialising, especially for people who find socialising difficult, whether for geographical or other reasons.

Also – when I did get into the conversation, I already knew some people, and knew the type of style of post that would be likely to cause least offense, etc. Oh, and time differences were not important any more.

So, when I use twitter, I am following the posts of people who I already ‘know’ through other means. And the thing I really like about twitter is not that people necessarily say anything amazing, but that they are *there*. It makes me feel part of a group of friends. I might see that someone has posted, and find myself thinking: ‘Still awake! They’re up late tonight’. Now, thats a pretty intimate thing to know about someone that you have never physically met.

Most of what we say to each other is nonsense. (recent theories about the evolution of language tie it to the rise of gossip!) That doesn’t make it worthless – if you sit down to breakfast with your family, you might not say a single thing that anyone remembers once five minutes has passed. I have a very close bond to my son, aged five, who will have no memory of any of the vast majority of our interactions, but that does not make them worthless. In fact, intimacy in a relationship might be a function of the amount of forgettable nonsense we are prepared to say, and prepared to listen to, only for it all to blow away like chaff.

So – not sure where any of this going. Except I think that the web can deliver real intimacy. A few months ago when I was having a very stressful night I ended up having a twitter-chat with Dan at 4am which meant a hell of a lot. Neither of us said anything very memorable. But it was enriching.

Indeed, it seems to me that the easier things are, the less satisfying they become. I too wonder about my declining books to cat-video ratio, and I attribute much of that ratio to the technologies in my life (aka the web) that seem to be filling much of my time with unsatisfying things.

Long ago I decided never to play video games, and never to have cable television, for the same reason in both cases, if I have em I watch em, and don’t do the things that, in my experience, enrich my life.

Now that the web has come around, I have my own private cable tv station, with unlimited supply of stuff, and that’s not a good thing, for many reasons.

(As for happiness, I have problems with that. I see no reason why we should ever expect to be happy, except for short periods. Usually we only realise how happy we should have been when a bad thing happens, and we wish we could back to our previous state, which we now realise was happy. We seem to have a monkey at the controls of our internal happy-dispenser, who only allows us brief periods of happiness when we do what it wants us to do (eat a lot of food, have sex, beat a rival, win a battle, etc etc) and then the new reality becomes the baseline, and we are quickly dissatisfied again. We find ourselves moaning about the time it takes to load the dishwasher, forgetting how long it used to take to wash up.)

Back to enriching: what is it to be enriched? I can think of things that do enrich my life (books, music etc), really good quality stuff that makes the world seem a different place. So why is it such a chore for me to actually read a good book sometimes? Why would I often rather play Wii Tennis? (And I think I read more that most people I know) If this is the case, what gives me the right to think that I can help anyone enrich their lives? I surround myself with enriching things, and end up making mud pies (metaphorically speaking – but literally too sometimes.)

I would worry that the desire to enrich others – in the way that I understand enrichment – might have roots in some belief that I have anything to offer in that way. That it would make me a hypocrite.

But I do speak from genuine ignorance – I would love to find out I was wrong.

Still, that’s not what you find crappy about it, and I agree.

How about http://www.kiva.org ?

You’ve decided to go see a movie and grab a bite to eat afterward. You’re in the mood for a comedy and some incredibly spicy Mexican food. Booting up your PC, you open a Web browser and head to Google to search for theater, movie and restaurant information. You need to know which movies are playing in the theaters near you, so you spend some time reading short descriptions of each film before making your choice. Also, you want to see which Mexican restaurants are close to each of these theaters. And, you may want to check for customer reviews for the restaurants. In total, you visit half a dozen Web sites before you’re ready to head out the door.

Some Internet experts believe the next generation of the Web — Web 3.0 — will make tasks like your search for movies and food faster and easier. Instead of multiple searches, you might type a complex sentence or two in your Web 3.0 browser, and the Web will do the rest. In our example, you could type “I want to see a funny movie and then eat at a good Mexican restaurant. What are my options?” The Web 3.0 browser will analyze your response, search the Internet for all possible answers, and then organize the results for you.

That’s not all. Many of these experts believe that the Web 3.0 browser will act like a personal assistant. As you search the Web, the browser learns what you are interested in. The more you use the Web, the more your browser learns about you and the less specific you’ll need to be with your questions. Eventually you might be able to ask your browser open questions like “where should I go for lunch?” Your browser would consult its records of what you like and dislike, take into account your current location and then suggest a list of restaurants….

We can do better than that.

He’s not separating humans from nature, but rather exploring how our use of (modern) technology changes our relationship to nature, and our relationship to ourselves. And I don’t think he says “de-humanizing” – that’s my poorly-chosen short-hand. And of course he harks back to the golden years of the mythical Greeks, though whatever the reference, the point is: fully embracing technology without thinking about the metaphysical implications, is dangerous. He says:

As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as object, but does so, rather, exclusively as standing-reserve, and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the standing-reserve, then he comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth. In this way the impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct.

“Standing-reserve” is the modern human view of the universe, through technology, ie. that which is to be mastered for our own use. Indeed this is the “natural” work of humans (it seems), but that doesn’t mean it has no implications, for instance, on our happiness.

As for “making other’s lives more meaningful,” and “making my own life more meaningful,” I am just suggesting that I would like these to be prime motivators for my efforts, rather than the same-old ordering of standing-reserve.

Finally, you are more positive in your interpretation of the web than I am. That’s my point I guess: it’s “self-evident” to those of us in the web/collaboration etc world that the web has resulted in enriched lives, and onwards and upwards. I think some of it has certainly enriched some lives. But much of it has not. All those RSS feeds, I’ve discovered, don’t enrich my life. With Twitter I am sitting on the fence, I enjoy it, but I am not sure it’s enriching. Blogging was enriching in many ways, but there might be other things that would be more enriching.

And so I’m just throwing a challenge to myself (and my friends) to think about enriching people’s lives as a driving force behind what I am doing on the web.

Heidegger’s scheme only makes sense if we consider humanity to be OUTSIDE of nature. I don’t consider humans to be anything other than biologically successful animals. Thus our ordering of information is as natural a thing to humans as building a nest is for birds. Ordering information does not de-humanise us: the opposite, it is as human as breathing, eating, and talking.

The ordering schemes you list are ordering what? The creative output of millions of people. Yes, google gets all the attention, but is has to have our creative output – ‘content’ – to present as search results.

How can I help to make somebody else’s life more meaningful? I have no idea. Indeed, I have no idea how to make my OWN life more meaningful. But things have unintended consequences. Like LV – it has enriched my life, and in many more ways than just listening to audiobooks.

All the internet really is, is a way to communicate with each other. And the more people who are talking, the better the chance that we will enrich each others lives in ways we cannot predict or plan.