6 The Shrine of Content

If I had to live my life again
I would have made a rule to read some poetry
and listen to some music at least once a week;
for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied
could thus have been kept active through use.

Charles Darwin

Satisfying the Cognitive Appetite

We’ve painted the picture of a social ecosystem as a multi-boundary space that supports the processes derived from the needs of the human species contained therein. Each boundary identifies a constituent element of the ecosystem and subsequently the delineation of a potential contributor through which to satisfy the various appetites that needs evoke. Appetites stimulate interactions to provide sustenance and these interactions can be described by collections of related protocols. Since the emergence of the first groups of humans, this has been a reasonable model of existence. So, in our consideration of computer networks, as typified by the Web, can we use the same model as a means of understanding? In a word, yes.

Interactions are the foci for policy, which elicits the establishment of the players who interact, the rules by which they interact, along with the mechanisms and the consequences of their interaction. This leaves us with the question of why? Why have interactions at all? Our answer has been that interactions serve to satisfy needs. During the course of an interaction, the trust we ascribe to the players and facilities of the containing policy infrastructure provides the final gating of the action stimulus. We either engage in the interaction or we defer. The satisfaction of needs, the sating of our appetites, we suggest, culminates through the ubiquitous interaction objective toward an instance called content. From both a real, physical perspective, as well as from this metaphorical perspective, the object of interactions is content. Content is what it’s all about.

This definition might be viewed as suggesting a bit of metaphysical sleight of hand. Our general perception of the term content suggests a tangible quantity. To the contrary of course, the results of some interactions, particularly those that are stimulated from higher up the needs hierarchy, sometimes seem less than tangible. From the standpoint of a formal or semi-formal description of interaction mechanisms, however, we suggest that the term is appropriate. Perhaps more to the point, it seems necessary. Specifically, the concept of content provides a target for the logic from which we can derive the formal specifications of the policy through which we establish a context for interactions. Essentially content is an object, or perhaps an objective, of the human sensori-motor system and its extensions; it is the means of satisfying the appetites created by the needs as suggested by Maslow.