There’s an effect in chaos theory called the Butterfly Effect— often described as how the movements of a butterfly in Brazil can cause (or prevent) a storm in Texas. It refers to how a tiny effect can have a massive consequence, and has been the subject of books, films and television programmes.

In the age of Web2.0 and user generated content, there’s something new about the effect of traffic flows on the Internet.

In the earlier days of the web, when websites tended to be ‘closed shops’ with possibly one or two external links to related websites, the web tended to be, from the users’ point of view, a bunch of connections from the user to the websites. It was almost as though we, the users, were sat at the hub of an international network, with thousands of connections reaching out across the web. (There’s a certain irony to how this illusion comes from an anthropocentric view of a global decentralised network— not unlike the pre-Copernican idea of the Earth being the centre of the universe simply because it looks like everything revolves around us.) We were aware that there were other links connecting everything to everything else, but they weren’t particularly important or relevant to us.

Now, in the so called Web 2.0 era, where content is frequently contributed or edited by users, or information is pulled from a number of different sites onto a single page, the truly erratic nature of the ebbs and flows of traffic over the internet has become more visible to web users; it no longer feels so much as though we’re sat at the centre of our own web, but just a part of the flow of traffic. (more…)

August 10th, 2007 | WWW | No comments