Why the internet works: a parable for pre-digital humans

The photo is a tweenbot, a cardboard smiley-face on wheels with a little motor that can only move straight ahead. As you will see in the video below, it also has a little flag that explains where it wants to go. The tweenbot is one way to understand how the internet works. The world of internet communication rests on unknown and unseen people performing random acts of kindness.

The whole story is in the videos linked below. I discovered this story because I was complaining about how difficult it is to explain the internet. Members of generations who are older than credit cards seem to shy away from, or distrust, the internet. Telephones I can explain, because phone lines are easy to see, up on poles along every country road. Cell phones have towers, and most of us understand radio waves. But how does that email and file attachment get from my computer in Hong Kong to a computer on a desk in Yangon, or in a café in Caracas, or on a farmer’s laptop in a dairy barn in Wisconsin? Or even all those places at once? How does it travel, and who owns the highway? And people really send money that way? That’s pretty scary.

A friend sent me the link to this talk about the internet. I broke it into two parts to make it easier to put into this post. I’ve put a few phrases on each section as markers about the content.

The Internet as Acts of Kindness – Part One

topics include: why bumblebees can’t fly; 3 old dudes who created the web; who runs the internet and where do they live; the ‘net and human rights, political and personal

The Internet as Acts of Kindness – Part Two

topics include: hitchhiking; mosh pits; tweenbots; ride-sharing; couch-surfing, and why the worldwide web works

43 people, complete strangers, helped the bot travel this path

Sometimes we who are in a later phase of life tend to look backward through our experiences and feel that social conditions, like our joints and hairlines and various other life mechanisms, have deteriorated. Is it true that people have changed for the worse?  This video presents evidence that cheered me up immensely.  I can’t go back to the cozy telephone party-line world of my childhood. But then, it wasn’t always comfortable either.  There’s something positive to the secular anonymity that Harvey Cox wrote about in the early 1960s. Party-lines can be a little restricting! When your village knows everything that goes on, it’s hard to blaze a new trail. It can be difficult to welcome those who are not "PLU", People-Like-Us.

Manhattan is a secular, anonymous environment in most ways. People who live there seem to have perfected the art of avoiding eye contact with anyone else on the sidewalk. But the little straight-line-only cardboard robot with the smiley face traveled all the way across the park. Forty-three random strangers along its path helped it. The tweenbot is how the internet works.  And it reminds me that maybe being human has not changed that much, and a little cardboard traveler has showed us the way of the future.
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Links for those who want to know more about Jonathan Zittrain’s perception of the internet and Kacie Kinzer’s tweenbot experiment

Jonathan Zittrain’s personal blog: The Future of the Internet

Talks and blogs on TED by or about Jonathan Zittrain

Kacie Kinzer’s Tweenbot Page

Final note: this post is based on talks given by Prof Zittrain in 2008. The tweenbot experiment took place in 2009. We don't know whether or how the Occupy Wall St encampments, especially in Manhattan, may relate to this insight. But it doesn't matter. It's a way to talk about the internet. It remains to be seen if Congressional legislation in late 2011 will succeed in destroying "random acts of kindness" as a stream of communication around the world.