In honor of Sir Tim Berners-Lee I post this link: http://home.cern/topics/birth-web.
The World Wide Web (WWW) is our user interface to the Information Age. The Internet is a back office function that we interface with when we pay our bill to the service provider. To call our WWW interface the "Internet" is an injustice to the open source gift given to us by Sir Tim. This is a season where we remember a gift given to redeem the world (some believe) and in that spirit we give gifts to others (if that is the causal factor) and receive them from Santa (I believe!) This is what I want to say: Sir Tim has given the world a gift that will keep on giving as it brings the world closer together. Symbolically has had given us the framework structure by which we can all symbolically join hands.
Describing the gift given us by Sir Tim as the "Internet" instead of the WWW is analogous to describing Santa's sleigh that he rode in on as the Spirit of Christmas. "Internet" describes our machines. That too is a gift of many technicians working in the back office like the reindeer pulling the sleigh. We give them credit too. All geeks should be honored with a red nose and at least one song as they guide our sleigh tonight.
Sir Tim is an extremely modest Santa that does not seek fame nor great profit. Maybe that is why we choose Santa as a role model that gives us the gift of sharing positive gifts among ourselves or bestowing lumps where appropriate. Our ability to do that was gift called the WWW given to us by Sir Santa Tim!
Last night watching a refreshingly simple and endearing Netflix series called "Detectorists" the two main characters used the term "Interweb" in their conversation. Genius! A term that resolves a serious error we have made in calling something that is of great importance to everyone in the world by a name that it is not but a name that gave birth to what is so important to our daily lives.
InterWeb! I like it and it should be InterWeb not Interweb. InterWeb is consistent with generally used protocol of the World Wide Web (WWW) that contracts two words to one word but capitalizes the second word. A protocol derived from programming language that gives us software operating systems and application programs that run on computer machines.
Call the combination of distinct hardware and distinct software connections working together the InterWeb. That is the foundation binary relationship of the Information Age thing we have created. In an Object Oriented manner of organizing things and what they do these are two Super Class Objects; the Internet and the World Wide Web. Use InterWeb to refer to the combination. Internet or WWW as specifically applicable.
I objected in several prior posts to the popular use of the word "internet" to mean the "World Wide Web". The internet is a big computer machine with an operating system and network communication system. The World Wide Web is the user interface application programs that we use on the World Wide Web.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web (WWW). DARPA created the Internet by networking computers in a hardware in a TCP/IP communication system. Tim Berners Lee created the WWW of URLs linked by hypertext.
The Information Age the product of many technological advancements from a wide variety of sectors contributing to its progressive advancement. Like the development of tools in the Industrial Age contributed to its output product of trains, planes and automobiles. The end user products that benefited us all. That legacy benefit now being enhanced by application of Information Age technology to give us better televisions and self driving cars and the NSA to do what spy vs spy used to do in Mad Magazine.
The Information Age is founded in large part on the combination of the Internet and the WWW. It is not simply unfortunate that we have chosen to call it the Internet. Logically the same as calling an automobile an "Assembly Line". Putting things in an improper frame detracts from their true identity and relationships. Computers with their operating systems and application programs are something that as a society we need to accurately understand.
The Information Age deals with conceptual objects. Information is a conceptual object system structure of abstract concepts that deliver the thing called "Information" about real things, conceptual things and relationships between real and our abstractions of reality that range in degree from simple abstractions to extremely complex abstractions.
We used to generally know how mechanical things worked. Dealing with "hands on" things was direct knowledge of the attributes and what they did in relationship to other mechanical/physical things. Guys, mostly, understood physical things. Built them, took them apart when necessary, fixed them. Physical things are easy to understand as well as the physical laws related to their properties.
Electric things were a step toward the need to understand things using abstract concepts of electricity that we could not see but could physically manipulate their properties. Things required increasingly specialized knowledge in the Industrial Age. However, they required a degree of knowledge on the part of the general public to understand the "how things worked' at the micro and macro levels.
Electronics launched the Information Age. Along with it came a greater requirement for understanding increasingly distant abstractions of the technology connecting the state of the art to the things that the state of the art delivers to us.
We are no longer educated consumers of the things that we use that are of greater importance in our lives. If we understood to even the most basic degree how things that are increasingly becoming the product of greater abstracted structural design it would benefit us as a society in controlling them for our own welfare and self interest. Not that we all become programmers or Information Engineers. We just need to understand the basic systemic structure. Increasingly it is only the most intelligent among us that do understand the entire system.
An elite understanding of the "Big Conceptual System That Drives Our World" at both the conceptual level and the application system that delivers the product of that elite understanding and control will drive us in accordance with the intentions of the elite if we do not grasp at the fundamental level how it all works.
Anybody can grasp a simple user interface to a complex system. Turn a computer on with a switch. Print things on a screen. Watch a movie. Beyond that? Any attempt to explain a simple way to correct an interface problem that requires the most fundamental understanding of how the system works beyond: "Turn it off then turn it on again and maybe it will work because it does something" is often met by: "I don't want to know how it works, I just want it to work".
End users are becoming "Dead End Users" because the do not even have the slightest idea of what is working behind the simplified user interface that is doing one thing for them but another thing for the designers and operators in the back office operations of what is being delivered. They know that end users do not want to know, or should not know and design accordingly. If anyone is curious or smart enough to want to know then alternate or intentionally deceptive systemic explanations might satisfy most of a small number of those that know at least enough to ask questions.
It is essential to an informed citizenry that we at least clearly understand the top level relationships and interactions of our Information Age Systems. Finance is not a new information system. It has however entered the Information Age just like old legacy mechanical systems have from the Industrial age. The public never had an adequate grasp of how money and finance worked in the first place. It still does not. In the Information Age legacy money and finance systems going back a thousand years are on steroids. There is no hope to understand it all. There is intention not to have the public understand it in the least. They must be uninformed users of the system.
What a thing is and what a thing does is the essence of understanding the nature of the relationship between two things at the granular level, among all things at the aggregate level in the physical real world or reality based conceptual abstractions (to abstractions built on abstractions) of the real world.
Confuse what a thing is with what it does or hide the true attributes of the thing from what it does and we fail to understand it. Curiosity about the natural world, to discover what is over a real horizon upon which the real sun sets is what has motivated us to discovery that placed mankind on a journey of discovery of how the physical world works. Maybe it started with climbing to the top of a tree to get a better view (and abruptly stopped there long ago) but curiosity explored our country and landed us on the moon.
We wanted to know! I'd like to think that the first person to climb a tree wanted to know what was up there and how that knowledge might have expanded their ability to hunt rather than climbing a tree for the first time because they were being hunted?
What has happened that we generally no longer know or have the curiosity to know. It is no longer easy to know the complexity we have created but at least we need to know, need to be curious about the fundamentals of the Information Age systems we have created.
Information itself is a centuries old legacy system expanded and enhanced by technology. Today it is defined by and embodied in the Internet and the World Wide Web.
But..........we do not even get that simple relationship right in the accuracy of terminology and the confused abstract conceptual view that is inconsistent with what the two things are and how they relate.
Reduce things to the granular level and get a binary relationship built on a rock. Expand the granular level to the aggregate level of the two things and the relationship is still binary. Decomposition from aggregate to its base granular level proves the integrity of the systemic structure.
That is the model that I have applied to the a Monetary System. It is the same model that applies to the hardware and software of the Information Age of Hardware and Software binary relationship at the aggregate level (like Internet and WWW binary relationship) that decomposes to this granular level binary for:
Hardware: The presence or absence of an electrical charge.
Abstraction of that physical presence/absence relationship to
Software: Conceptual meaning of the abstracted nature of the electrical charge to expression as 1 and 0 (one and zero).
Application of that simple relationship between Hardware and Software through systemically designed structures that are exact and direct mirror image representations of each other at all levels. One physical, the other its conceptual abstraction.
The sum of the conceptual abstraction is more than the sum of its physical counterpart like the sum of our thinking is more than the sum of the physical brain and its electro/chemical composition that supports abstract thought.
What is the difference between our brain and computer hardware and software?
I don't think our brain operates on the physical presence or absence of an electrical charge. It only operates on presence of something physical. Observing the binary rule of nature: Two real things, not the presence of a thing being defined by its absence, that is the domain of abstraction of reality. Maybe the physical basis is electric and chemical.
The abstract binary counterpart?
That is a mystery but we are curious.
However, the mystery is pursued in the same manner as we are advancing the Information Age. By a clear understanding of the basic relationship and elimination of ambiguity by system design rules.
The rule says: Call a thing a thing in accordance with an exact term definition. Use that strict definition and it meaning at all levels top to bottom with integrated logical extension to all other equally well defined (independently as well as contextually) things in the system.
Using a different view of the same rule it is all about conceptual Object Oriented design and implementation.
Get the Object right!
Internet and World Wide Web. Two different things. Combined to a higher level abstract thing called:
InterWeb.
Accuracy is Supremacy!
Use the abstract symbols correctly!
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