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Editorial - The Seed and the Environment
by Tom van de WeteringTim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, was clear in a recent TED key-note. He shouted"Raw Data Now!" and left his public an interesting thought: the future will bring a web consisting of “linked data” instead of “linked documents”.Simply put, this event was a successor in a long tradition of predictions and dreams on file structuressuch as the Web. Back in 1945, Vannevar Bush tried to conceptualize something like a ‘dreammachine’, which was further elaborated by Ted Nelson’s ‘dream file’ (1964). Not long after itsinvention in 1990, the Web was seen by many as the realization of previous dreams, but a next step,sometimes called “Semantic Web” and sometimes “Web2.0”, evoked dreams and predictions like aVulcan eruption. So why is just this keynote important, and not one of the many others?First, it is because Sir Tim Berners-Lee expressed his dreams. Unless there were many other factorsinvolved during the emergence of the Web, it was Berners-Lee who invented the important HTML,HTTP and URI protocols. Still, he remains responsible for the development of original and new Webprotocols, like XML, as director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Galloway (2006) alreadyshowed that protocols control in a way the structure of contemporary networks. In that sense,Berners-Lee is a powerful actor in the construction of a “control machine”. This special issue of Network Theory deals with the problem of control. Not on the frequently elaborated level of politicalcontrol, social control or capital control, but on the level of network control. How is the structure of the Web controlled, which actors are involved, how are structures changed and, last but not least,how do we need to study it?In the first article, Coen de Goey claims that common perceptions of control need to be reevaluated.Distributed network structures like the Web are still controlled by a small set of institutions. Thestructure of Web2.0 is thought of to bring the user in control, but instead, De Goey argues, the usercreated together an instrument that took others in control.The second contribution disperses fluently from Berners-Lee’s keynote too. To deal with the complexsystem the inventor is arguing about and to translate technical details to a broad audience, Berners-Lee uses a lot of metaphors. The important thing is that some of them seem pretty new, like “rawdata”. Michiel Stoter claims that metaphors are, and have always been, important actors who areinvolved with the structure of the Web. Metaphors ubiquitously present in the debate about“Web2.0”, “Semantic Web” and are we aware that the terms “web” and “link” are metaphors too?Third, the concept of linked data Berners-Lee proposes, indicates an interesting claim on structuralWeb changes. In the third article, I will show how seemingly little changes of Web standards, whichare often misinterpreted, facilitate practices that are known to change the Web and far beyond, likeWeb2.0. I will introduce the field of Software Studies, that can help Network Science and other fieldsto better understand and define the Web objects we all encounter.In the fourth article, Jeroen Knitel will further elaborate that methodological problem. He states thatthe connectionism approach to study complex systems delivered interesting results, but needs to
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