Should we plunge headlong into the waves and hope to remain bouyant in the social media storm or head for maven haven on the mountain top?

The web is awash with water metaphors, from streaming video to bittorrent file-sharing protocols. And now we have Google Wave, Mozilla Raindrop and open access to the Twitter firehose.

Similar metaphors are often used to describe human emotional experience and the unconscious realm of memories, dreams and reflections. However, as always when venturing into Neptune’s watery domain, not everything is quite as it appears to be.

The internet is not a series of tubes directly interconnecting nodes to create communications channels but a packet-switching network in which content is divided into little data parcels sent via multiple momentarily-determined routes before being reassembled at its destination.

This engineering not only makes the internet very robust it also makes it neutral, as the data packets are carried without regard for their content. All data is thus equal online, notwithstanding the recent use of deep packet inspection by some Internet Service Providers to discriminate against certain kinds of traffic.

So data does not travel in hyperreality the same way as water flows through the real world. What does this have to do with the way we think about the web?

Being able to distinguish between fantasy and reality is always important, but never more so than when we are considering what we might be inclined to view as a techno-utopian fountain of knowledge.

Computer networks may operate according to the packet-switching protocols that govern them, but the humans that use them continue to behave in ways described by social psychology: in herds, influenced by status and impressed by cultural and political authority.

This is what results in an internet that resembles the image above, rather than the egalitarian interdependency that is often promoted as the brave new world wide web.

A research project plotting the topological structure of the internet in terms of the connections between nodes, while taking into account the roles the connections play, produced some arresting results.

It turns out that a dense core of a few critical highly-connected nodes are surrounded by an outer periphery of many sparsely-connected nodes which are heavily dependent on the core. Between the two lies a mantle of very many peer-connected and largely self-sufficient nodes. If the core is removed from the network, about 30 percent of the outer nodes become completely isolated.

This concentration of traffic in a few dense nodes supports the view that behemoths like Google, Facebook and Twitter excessively influence the web in the same way as key superpowers influence global politics and culture.

It also reflects the inequitable distribution of power, wealth and influence in our world.

An open web is an equal web. We must not mistakenly assume that the neutrality of computer networks is a metaphor, and guarantee, for equality in the human interactions they enable.

And there is no need for another metaphor to make the point that, like water, not all of us have equal access to the resources on which this new world order depends.

See also How Twitter Works In Theory and the subsequent Twitter Thoery Applied To Google Buzz for more about Flow, Faces, Phatic, Following, Publics, Mutual Media and Small World Networks.

Hosted on whose servers for free?

Useful interview. Shame about the lousy video player interface design (it’s ten minutes long and no, you can’t control the playhead).

First of all, despite the way it was pitched on initial launch, Wave is not simply a replacement for instant messaging or email, although it does incorporate features that look very similar to those communication modes. Nor is it a new form of social media along the lines of Facebook or Twitter.

What makes it different to these is that instead of propagating or exchanging discrete chunks of content across the web, it supports the collaborative creation of self-contained documents in a specific, single location.

What is so revolutionary about that? In a way, making a self-contained document the canonical content source, without copies elsewhere, is a return to the early days of the web, when individual pages authored in HTML were served as read-only content in response to individual requests, and only further networked via hyperlinks.

A Wave differs from a page of HTML in a very important way, however. As its name suggests, it contains fluid, rather than static, content. Not (necessarily) animated CGI graphics of waterfalls but a collaboratively created and edited real-time stream of text, audio and video coalescing into a single constantly updated content element.

Imagine the future of news, as Jeff Jarvis does: three journalists, four witnesses and two editors together create a story using text, audio and video using laptops and mobile phones which they format at the scene of an event and then publish everywhere, to all kinds of devices, instantly. Think then of others responding to this news story by contributing their own perspectives and unique content, not just in the form of comments and feedback, but by directly inserting new material into the document. That would be a Wave, changing form as it rolled out in all directions at once.

So is a Wave like a wiki? Wikis and Waves are certainly both collaborative creation and editing tools, but as those who have edited a Wikipedia article know, there are two faces to every page on the site. Each article not only has a public-facing content page, it also incorporates revisions and discussion pages which are only visible to its editors.

Waves, by contrast, are about simultaneously editing a document and having those edits fuse into a single piece of content, with discussion and edited summary both visible. And when I say simultaneous, I mean exactly that: the operational transform protocol that powers a Wave is very nearly synchronous, even across federated servers, meaning that as you add new text on your screen I see your keystrokes included in the Wave on mine.

So will Google Wave roll out and absorb everything in its path? It certainly represents a completely new kind of web platform, and promises to become at least as ubiquitous as RSS, even if also mostly invisible to the end consumer. But is most of the noise around it because, as Gina Trapani remarked, ‘Wave is to developer’s egos as complex jazz is to musicians’? It is true that one of its strengths is that developing gadgets and bots to extend its core functionality resembles the familiar web development process that has allowed so many coders to profit from the enormous success of Facebook, Twitter et al.

On the other hand, there are a couple of as yet unresolved technical issues which prompt criticism, despite the project’s alpha development stage. One problem is that there is currently no whitelisting or permissions system to control the accessibility of identifying contact information which not only makes privacy an issue but also makes spam control impossible. This must be a priority for the beta release.

The other, perhaps more intractable, issue is that the Wave operational transform protocol does not output simple HTML, which would facilitate universal one-step publishing, instead preferring a custom Wave document format written in XML which has made developers’ eyes roll. Whether the Wave team choose to move on from this position remains to be seen.

And there are some questions about the ways we might use Wave in the real world. At the moment, Wave’s federal core means that while all participants in a particular Wave remain on a single server, others cannot see what they are up to: it is only when others are invited to join in that the wave federates across servers, propagating changes as they are made. While this looks ideal for private document management inside organisations, it doesn’t support the new media publishing vision outlined above.

Another issue is the missing consensus process that makes Wikipedia function so well. Waves, like wikis, need shared goals (in the case of Wikipedia, a neutral point of view) to guide their creation. Without such consensus, the deletion that content editing requires could be perceived as a hostile, or at least censorious, act. The social psychology that accounts for the way many are motivated to contribute to some of the web’s greatest successes may need careful consideration before the Wave user experience design team settles on such unmediated interaction modes.

For now, in the absence of public Waves (you still need an invite to see what’s going on first hand), here’s an entertaining glimpse into the flavour of the platform, courtesy of Whirled Interactive:

If you want to know more about what you currently can and cannot do with Wave and its gadgets and bots, you would do well to check out Gina Trapani’s Complete Guide to Google Wave.

Via This Week in Google Episode 10.

And who could belong to one set without also belonging to the other?