Much to my surprise, I thought I’d posted this much earlier– I first came up with this in 1998 with BiblioBytes, and presented it at the first meeting of the Media Ecology Association and published it in the SFWA Bulletin, but amazingly, I didn’t have it anywhere online. So I’m going to remedy that now, in order that I can write a few other essays about Google, file-sharing, and a few other things that I’ve been putting off. Please bear in mind that this is from notes that date almost six years now (hence discussions of things like “data dialtone”).
The Three Laws governing growth of the Internet
#1. Computers owe their growth and impact to a phenomenon dubbed Moore’s Law (after Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel), which says that computing power and capacity double every 18 months. This exponential growth led to the digital revolution, and it has only just begun.
#2. Networks have their own growth rule. According to Metcalfe’s Law (named after Bob Metcalfe, the founder of 3Com and inventor of the Ethernet standard commonly used in PC networks), the “value” of a network — defined as its utility to a population — is roughly proportional to the number of users squared. An example is the telephone network. One telephone is useless: whom do you call? Two telephones are better, but not much– at best, you have the old hotline between the US and USSR at the height of the Cold War. If you get one installed every city, you have the functionality of the telegraph system. If you get down to each neighborhood, you have the old party line system. It is only when most of the population has telephones that the power of the network reaches its full potential to change society.
The Internet draws its power from its ability to harness both these laws at once. “Data dialtone” — networking as widespread as the telephone — suddenly seems not only possible, but likely.
#3, relating to content, is humbly referred to as Hauman’s Law (so dubbed by Dr. Paul Levinson, wearing his Media Theorist hat) and states that:
The overall value of a content collection is equivalent to the amount of accessible content squared.
Consider a library. One book has limited value, and is unlikely to have one single piece of information you want or need. (By information, I use the mathematical term defined by Claude Shannon in lay terms as “The difference that makes a difference.”) A hundred books, some value. A thousand books, even more useful. A ten thousand book library can serve the needs of a very small community. A hundred thousand books in a store can serve a number of neighboring towns. A million books can serve a university.
But please note the word “accessible”. There are many things that can affect the accessibility of a content collection.
* Meta-information, or information about the content itself. The amount of work it takes to find the piece of content that you’re looking for increases exponentially with the size of the content collection, so that additional information must be generated about the content to allow for ease in searching and locating the desired information.
Taking cues from the example above: One book requires a table of contents. A hundred books may require an index. A thousand books, you probably want to at least have them alphabetized on your shelves. A ten thousand book library needs a catalog. A hundred thousand books in a store requires a paid staff to sort and categorize them. A million books requires a catalog, a large professional staff, tracking systems, and climate controls.
Other examples of meta-information include reviews, bibliographies, FAQs, recommendation services such as the Book-of-the-Month Club, Internet search engines, or full text searching of all the information.
* Price. The cost may prove to be a barrier to entry for many potential users. Also convenience: how much trouble is it to pay the price? Getting a postal money order may be more of a barrier than the amount of money involved. See also: credit cards online.
* Location and Availability. The effort to cover distance to access the content (i.e. driving ten miles to get to the bookstore or library) is an additional barrier to entry, as are the hours the content is available.
* Content restrictions. Some examples: adult sections of the local library, stack access at research libraries, books excluded from spinner racks because they are too wide, and legislation making some content unavailable over the Internet.
It is this final growth law, the explosion and indexing of huge amounts of information, that truly makes the Internet the wonder that it is. And the application of Hauman’s Law has some very dramatic implications, which I’ll go into in later posts.