How do internet systems
and conversation media evolve?
In this chapter, we show that systems and conversation media didn’t come out of nowhere, or are the product of a creationist act, but the result of an evolution. By doing that, we wish to defend an evolutionary perspective and warn against mistakes such as saying someone is the father of a given conversation medium.
Theories about evolution are proposed in several fields of knowledge as a way to understand how the objects of study of each field relate to each other, and how and why they change with time. Studies about evolution began in Biology; however, particularly after the publication of Darwin’s theories about the origin of the species in 1859, experts in Sociology (Spencer, 1860), Linguistics (Schleicher, 1869) and Design (Steadman, 1979), for example, also proposed theories, concepts and models to explain the evolution in their fields.
| Origin and evolution of living beings
All species of living beings descend from a common ancestor, and current species are the result of a series of extinction events and origin events of new species. This process is gradual; a species doesn’t appear suddenly. Evolution consists in genetic mutations observed between generations of a population. The main evolutionary processes responsible for genetic variation are recombination, mutation and natural selection. |
In order for us to understand how computing systems and conversation media evolve, we have elaborated in this chapter a theoretical framework of the evolutionary process of these objects of study. We have identified the functionalities of systems as the unit to be analyzed to observe evolution; we have characterized innovations as responsible for evolution; and we have established the evolutionary relations among systems and conversation media to emphasize that they didn’t come out of nowhere.
What evolves: features
Features are the actions and behaviors of a system; they are the things that the system does, the system’s functions. Users become aware of features through the system’s interface. Examples of features are: message sending, message received notifications, records of a conversation’s messages (logs), lists of online friends and indications of user availability, among several others.
While variations in living beings are observed in phenotypes, variations among systems are observed in terms of interface and features. Some systems stand out because their design includes innovations, that is, features that didn’t exist in previous systems of the same medium. Some features that were found in previous systems are modified in new systems (or in new versions of the same system) in order to better meet the needs of users. Features with a higher success rate tend to be kept throughout time in systems that implement a same medium, while those that aren’t successful tend not to be replicated by subsequent systems. We recognize, therefore, that the feature is the unit to be analyzed in order to observe the evolution of systems.
Innovations: changes that are responsible for evolution
A system, be it natural or artificial, goes through changes from time to time. Computing systems specifically go through changes in software, hardware, and in the culture of users for which they were designed.
General System TheoryA system, according to Bertalanffy (1950), consists in a set of elements dynamically interrelated, forming an activity in order to reach a goal, operating with inputs (information, energy, matter) and generating processed outputs (information, energy, matter). Thus, any and all systems have elements, interrelations and objectives; they exist within an environment, and it’s the constant interaction that defines the identity of the system as a whole. |
The evolution of a given conversation medium is identified through innovations in the features of systems that implement the medium. Technologies change through innovations, characterized by new ideas or the combined reutilization of old ideas. For an idea to be considered innovative, it has to bring something new to the market, such as a product, a service or a process that was significantly improved. To once again make an analogy with Biology, the innovations responsible for changes in the evolution of technologies are equivalent to the genetic recombination and mutation responsible for the evolution of living beings.
Genetic recombination and mutation: evolutionary changes in living beingsThe genotype is the entire set of genes of an individual, and the phenotype is the result of the interaction of the genotype with the environment, corresponding to the set of observable characteristics of an individual, among anatomic, physiological, biochemical and behavioral characteristics. |
An innovation can be evolutionary, revolutionary or disruptive (Christensen, 1997). Most innovations are evolutionary or revolutionary: they incrementally improve the performance of already established products. Disruptive innovations are the ones that radically change a product or even an existing market. Few technologies are considered results of disruptive innovations.
Innovations in systems that implement conversation media come from the possibilities created by technological evolution and the culture of use of other systems. For example, the development of computer networks in the 1970s allowed the communication among remote users in different computers, which, in its turn, aided the development of systems for conversation among several users via chat and forum. The culture of use of the systems that implemented these media influenced the burgeoning of communities whose evolution resulted in current social network systems such as Facebook. It’s an incremental, evolutionary process.
A few false beliefs about the way innovative ideas are originated strengthen the creationist view: that they spark in the mind of a solitary genius, suddenly and out of nowhere. The myth of the solitary genius is probably one of the most persistent in the history of mankind and has its origins in classical antiquity, when it was believed that ideas came from divine inspiration and that creativity was an exclusive characteristic of few privileged people. The consequence of this paradigm is the mistaken image of isolation between a creator and their community. The false belief that innovative ideas suddenly spring in the mind of a person was reinforced by legends such as: the “eureka” moment, related to the discovery of a principle of hydrostatics; the apple that fell from the tree and originated the theory of gravity; or the lamp, which suddenly appeared, leading to the invention of the light bulb. These beliefs that support the creationist view are mistaken, because innovations are the result of several connections of ideas in a collaborative process, influenced by previous innovations. It’s not divine creation, but a continuous transformation; “nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is transformed”.
“Nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is transformed”This famous quote was said by French scientist Antoine Lavoisier regarding the principle of mass conservation. In this book, when discussing technologies, we avoid the term “creation” and adopt the term “development”, which alludes to a continuous and collaborative process of transformation. |
Ideas don’t come suddenly. They begin with the perception that there is something interesting to explore, and remain in a state of incubation for a long time until they become a project. Until an idea results in a successful project, several experiments are necessary, with trials and errors. The knowledge acquired with experiences and mistakes leads to the acquirement of knowledge, which will allow the development of future projects (Johnson, 2010). Each new system or technology introduces new combinations of ideas which, in their turn, may influence future projects; the evolution of the systems that implement conversation media is the result of a continuous exploration of these combinations.
Some ideas may not be put into practice or be successful in a given moment because they’re ahead of their time, constituting a leap that is beyond the technological or cultural possibilities of their age. It can take from 20 to 40 years between the idealization and popularization of an innovation. Many technologies were commercialized only decades after their experimental phase, such as, for example, those exhibited in “the mother of all demos”.
The mother of all demos“The mother of all demos” is the name of a demonstration made in 1968 by Douglas Engelbart, in which he presented several technologies such as the mouse, videoconferencing, teleconferencing, the hypertext, text processing, hypermedia, object addressing and collaborative editing. |
The mistaken belief that computing systems spring out of nowhere is reinforced by market practices, which, due to copyright issues, in general don’t advocate an open discussion about which technologies influenced a new project. In order to avoid accusations of plagiarism and lawsuit costs, the market adopts a creationist discourse, as if each technology came out of nothing, with no references to previous ones. In software development, professionals prioritize the use of languages such as UML, which doesn’t offer support for system modelling based on previous solutions, reinforcing the creationist notion. However, developers have a culture of use of other systems that helped them conceive the new product. There are methods such as domain analysis and competitor analysis, which, in a way, deal with the culture of existing systems with the purpose of supporting the development of new systems. We believe that a language for the creation of systems such as UML should supply notes that make clear which features from other systems were the foundation for the design of a new system.
Evolutionary relationships: influences among systems
A remarkable difference between the evolution of technologies and the evolution of living beings are evolutionary relationships. In biological evolution, every living being descends from a common ancestor and their differences appeared throughout millions of years; the transmissions occur vertically in time, through genetic inheritance. On the other hand, in the evolution of technologies there is no common origin, because multiple influences occur. As we have illustrated in the beginning of this chapter, when designing an email service, the development team will be influenced by the several systems which have already implemented that same conversation medium. Of course the most recent systems will have a greater influence on the team; the most popular systems, such as Gmail and Facebook’s Message service, will be important references for the new system that is being designed.
Genetic inheritance: evolutionary relationships among living beingsGenetic inheritance is the process of transmission of genetic code from parents to their descendants. The combination of the genetic code of parents passed through sexual reproduction with the errors (mutations) that occur in their transmission is responsible for the biological variation which, through the process of natural selection, allows the evolution of species. |
The evolution of technologies comes from intelligent design, from the act of designing, and is a product of human rationality (Steadman, 2008). The design of features of a new system undergoes multiple influences, and is not restricted to a single ancestor. Before and during the design of a new system, or of a new version of an existing system, the development team comes into contact with several data that influence the decision making process, such as other systems, the culture of use of these other systems, technological novelties and information from other fields.
Sometimes, the evolutionary process of systems is described as a Darwinist process:
In contrast, the Web is developing as we speak, and experiments happen on the open Internet with us all as test subjects — not in a videotaped usability lab. The result is a much harsher Design Darwinism, where ideas crash and burn in public. Eventually, the best design ideas will survive and bad ones will decline because users will abandon poorly designed sites.” (Nielsen, 2000)
We agree with this evolutionary perspective, but disagree with the analogy with Darwinism, which is based on genetic transmission; we consider that evolutionary process of systems much more similar to Lamarck’s theories about characteristics that are acquired through use and disuse.
Darwinism x LamarckismAccording to Darwin (1859), the evolution of living beings happens gradually, with variations in the distribution of the genetic characteristics of individuals that every population goes through with each generation. The studies made by Mendel (1866), which were the foundation of genetics, have demonstrated that the source of these variations is hereditary, and led to a better understanding of how species develop. In the 1940s, the evolutionary synthesis combined Darwin’s theories with Mendel’s studies and refuted rival theories, such as Lamarck’s (1809), which speculates that evolution is caused by the gradual change of organisms due to the use and disuse of an organ or the direct influence of the environment over the genetic material, with changes being transmitted to the following generations by the inheritance of acquired characteristics. |
In the evolution of systems, it’s the culture of “use and disuse” that leads to the propagation of features in subsequent systems. The features of systems that are more used (the most popular) tend to influence the design of posterior systems, because systems that become popular indicate user acceptance and are also known by system developers. Because of that, their features tend to be present in subsequent systems. On the other hand, systems that are known by few users tend to be unknown by developers also, and therefore their features don’t influence the following generations of systems.
While biological evolution occurs in the transmission of genes through reproduction, in cultural evolution what is propagated from person to person is the meme (Dawkins, 1989), which corresponds to an idea or anything that can be learned by the human brain. In the evolution of systems, features propagate among developers due to experiences of use of other systems.
Influences of other systems in the Gmail designIn the design of the first version of Gmail, launched in April 2004, developers realized that some users were tired of the constant problems found in other webmails, such as the low storage limit and the impossibility of finding and recovering old messages. In order to solve these problems, Google developers offered 1 gigabyte of storage space with constant growth and a message search feature. |
Twitter’s design is an example of the multiple influences over a new system: the posting of a message centered on the author is an adaptation of blog services; and SMS mobile services influenced the feature of the exchange of short text messages. The combination of these features resulted in an innovative system, whose success contributed to the consolidation of the microblog as a new conversation medium. Aside from technologies, features and the culture of use of other conversation systems, other fields of knowledge also influenced Twitter’s design.
Influences of technologies from other fields over Twitter’s designJack Dorsey, one of the developers of Twitter, was fascinated by the technology of vehicle dispatch in real time, used in emergency logistics for ambulances, police cars and fire engines. Dorsey’s experiences with these technologies influenced the concept of personal status updates in real time in Twitter’s design. |
Another example of a design that made its influences explicit is Google Voice, created as a combination of features of conversation media launched in the last 200 years. Some of these influences are related to the evolution of the telephone, which in its turn was influenced by the telegraph. Other influences are related to other conversation media, such as email and SMS.
In some cases, the system’s development is well documented and it’s possible to determine its influences. For example, the first email systems designed for the ARPANet computer network were developed by the same team or by related teams. The documentation that’s currently available allows us to characterize the influences among systems. For example, the WRD system combined SNDMSG’s feature of message sending via web, READMAIL’s feature of message reading on the web, RD’s feature of organizing messages by subject or date, and the more user friendly interface of NRD. In its turn, WRD innovated when it presented the features of integration of message sending and reading in a single system, which in its turn influenced the MSG system, developed soon afterwards.
Therefore, the features of systems that implement the same conversation medium evolve with time. Both an email system developed in the end of the 1960s and the contemporary Facebook Message system have features that enable users to establish an asynchronous conversation between two or among few interlocutors that exchange elaborate text messages. Services that implement the same conversation medium present a set of features in common in order to allow the specific conversation mode of that medium. However, this set of features evolves with time – for example, the feature of forwarding a message, currently found in nearly all email services, was only developed almost a decade after the first systems that implemented this conversation medium.
It’s important to remember that the evolution of the support has a great influence over the development of new features; similarly, in Biology, geographic isolation generates different habitats that lead to speciation. For example, Hotmail was influenced by the development of the web, which then was a new computing platform, and thus a new “habitat” for the development of systems.
Computing platformComputing platforms are environments that have an infrastructure for the development of systems. Some examples of computing platforms are: computer networks, the desktop, the web, social networks, smartphones. Each of these platforms increased the possibilities of conversation and led to the development of innovations in systems’ features. |
In a nutshell, the evolution of systems that implement conversation media is a process in which multiple influences occur (system don’t descend from a single ancestor), with an intelligent design of features (instead of random mutations), based on human knowledge, on the technologies of each time and, above all, on the culture of use and disuse of systems (and not on genetic transmission or software code transmission).
Evolution of conversation media
If systems evolve, do conversation media evolve too?
As with systems, a new conversation medium does not have only one ancestor; the development of a conversation medium is the product of multiple influences, and it’s not possible to represent them in a sequence such as in the Tree of Life, but in a network of influences, as shown in the following illustration.
The first conversation media implemented on computers were influenced by non-digital communication media: the postal mail, the telephone, the notice board, the printed press. In the 1960s the first experiences of conversation through computers took place, influenced by file sharing systems and by the attempt to create within the computer a communication that was similar to that made by postal mail, with a message being sent to a receiver.
The recognition of a new conversation medium doesn’t occur immediately. It happens after the systems that implement it has been used for some time and become popular. The blog is an example of a conversation medium that obtained gradual recognition, becoming known in the community of developers and users only after several experiments in computing systems.
The blog and its gradual recognition as a conversation mediumIn the 1990s, websites were static pages, with few content updates and totally controlled by the author, who had to have a thorough knowledge of the technologies needed to publish each page. By the end of the same decade, a few users began using these static websites as personal journals or newspapers, recording what was happening in the web. These pioneers commented on web content and posted links to other pages, taking on the role of content filter of a given theme. This record of the web was initially called weblog. A few authors published lists with links to all the blogs they knew, contributing to the burgeoning of a community, which would later become the blogosphere. |
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