Darwin’s Law predicates that the strongest will survive and carry on to produce better adapted progeny. The world we know and live in has been built on this, or as some would argue - it has been. Many would suggest that money and the accumulation of great wealth while benefiting society has also changed the laws of survival.

When Sir Timothy Berners-Lee took part in giving birth to the world wide web the beginnings of a new branch of evolution was given life. Sure it was a life of one’s and zero’s but like mankind, once that spark was lit there was no holding back its onward rush. Once that first hyperlink was clicked we were a forever changed society - there was no putting that genie back in the bottle. Just as how closely tied we would become to this electronic life force could never be reversed.

Those first steps of childhood on this new thing called the internet were wide-eyed and full of wonder at what possibilities lay ahead. Everything was new and there were no boundaries. We were playing in a brand new open landscape where we could make our own laws of evolution for this new world.

As this Web 1.0 stumbled through its infancy we saw it move from being the playground of those who could afford the costs of early adoption to an almost country fair where anyone who could afford the low price of admission could join in this new society. After all that is what this new electronic frontier had become - a society.

It was a society in the truest sense of the word as it had all the concepts that make up a society. It had everything from the good right through to everything that is bad and evil about us as a human race. Our electronic childhood was becoming a faded memory as we passed through the adolescence that had been proclaimed far and wide to be Web 2.0. During this period we saw the growth of the movement that believed the time of the social web is now. Everyone has to be social, everyone should be a part of a social network - the bigger one the better, or as many as you possibly can. This hyperbole has always struck me more of being one big garden tea party where the technology and internet elite talk about how what they think the web is and where it should direct itself.

Now from the ivory towers of our electronic home we are beginning to hear the rumblings of what is being proclaimed as the next evolution of our cyber family tree. Without even dealing with the underpinnings of what we are building on we are hearing words like Web 3.0, Semantic Web and now that it gained the countenance of Sir Timothy himself - Social Graph. As the press and discussions build their inevitable mountain of opinion one has to wonder at this rush of unbridled forward momentum, especially when considering the weakness of the foundations it is trying to build upon.

Contrary to the natural laws of the survival of the fittest the web has become more of a modern get quick rich scheme off of the backs of people wanting to belong to something larger than themselves and willing to give up just about anything to do so. While natural selection predicated that only the best of the previous generations shall go on to create future generations, our electronic doppelganger world increasingly represents what our real world has become. A place where money is the driving factor of everything being done regardless of the fancy terminology being used to sugar coat the increasing technological divide that has been created.

In the beginning years of Sir Timothy’s child the key concept was the free exchange of ideas and information; and even though we now have the tools to make this ideal a true reality we have been succumbed into thinking that the web is all about us giving away our information for the huge financial benefit of a few. Where information was meant to be a benefit for the whole it now becomes the marketplace where the worth of all that collected personal information is your ticket in.

All this is being built on top of a foundation that has some serious flaws in it as well. We have a system that can be brought to its knees by well placed botnet attacks, spammers run rampant across all the web mediums and security has become a salable item in thousands of electronic thieves markets. Instead of building future generations of our cyber namesakes from a solid base we are willingly diluting the electronic soup of life for no benefit.

Charles Darwin wrote “… doing what little one can to increase the general stock of knowledge is as respectable an object of life, as one can in any likelihood pursue” and we as individuals within a society have the greatest tool ever bequeathed us and yet we for the large part squander it away under the illusion being handed us that what we are is more important than what we know.

The fact is that human knowledge doesn’t in the end care who brought the knowledge, it only cares what the knowledge is. Anything else is just chum to muddy the waters making it harder to see the clear expanse of the human knowledgebase - the ultimate gift of mankind to itself. Instead we have turned our modern Library of Alexandria into nothing more than a playground where we nudge and wink at each other while believing these social networks and graphs we rush to join is increasing our human knowledge.

The only thing it proves I am afraid is how much we haven’t evolved our virtual world beyond anything more than a way for the garden party cliques to fool us into thinking we are and getting rich in the process. Social Networks, Web 3.0 and Social Graphs are nothing more than fancy buzz words to placate us as we continue to fill in web form after web form for nothing more than a suggestion of being a part of something cool.

Building anything on top of a flawed system is bound to be flawed itself and Web 3.0; or whatever it ends up being called, will be no different from Web 2.0 in this regard. Adding an updated version number to some buzz word doesn’t make the product any better just as using the shell game of buzz words doesn’t hide the fact that nothing we are doing is evolutionary and is sure isn’t intelligent design either.

Listening to: Blackmore’s Night - Past Times With Good Company - Past Time With Good Company

Conversation Tags: Web 2.0, Web 3.0, Social Graph, social network, hype