Spaces: how to make Internet 4D

Imagine that we live in a world where people have honed to perfection the art of presenting and consuming information. The knowledge base available to everyone does not create the root causes of conflict but a stimulus for further development in any field of life. Disputes arise not because people have different views of the same situation, but because they look for the best course of action. The evolution of science, technology, civil society, media and other spheres of life would impress even the most hardened skeptics. It is really hard to believe in such a utopia. However, the fact remains that the optimization of information flow can make our world a better place. 

Members of consumer society do not seek to deepen their knowledge, because it requires their precious effort, while everything is at their fingertips anyway. Hence the attractiveness of information space should lie in its accessibility and beauty — in this case, the released energy of an individual can be channeled into constructive and analytical pursuits (giving is healthier than receiving). In the flows of such a space even the laziest mind would be lit up by a desire for knowledge, for analyzing the information and generating ideas.

In this article I’m considering the Internet and “network” communications. Google, Wikipedia, and news sites are developing, but this development is slow and disproportionate given the information flow emanating from people, companies, and organizations, which increases in volume by dozens and hundreds of times year after year. Services are socialized and monetized, but a fully fledged analysis remains the concern of professionals and old school tools (NSA uses Powerpoint for analytical data). The approach to data visualization used by projects whose task is to transmit such data is far from ideal.

Information accumulates like fossils in the earth’s crust — one layer falls on top of another, yesterday’s information is buried under new data, and researchers or journalists involved in information supply need a method which is similar to a mobile drilling rig.

The “loneliness” of an opinion of a conditional journalist acting today as “an aggregator of flows” creates another problem — an overestimation of minor and underestimation of important details. It is the result of a person’s views, the environment where he or she works, his or her condition as they do their job. All of us are wise after the event. The larger and the more relevant the topic is, the more information there is about it on the Web and the more coverage it can reach. The trouble of the situation is that with an increase in the relevance, the accuracy of interpretation of the entire event by one journalist decreases proportionately.

An archaeologist looks for artifacts and fossils within a limited area. People working with information do not have to clean their findings from dust and dirt, but they have to deal with the effects of time as well, not to mention the immensity of the field of search — sometimes an attempt to understand the morals and manners gives you a headache from the very beginning.

Let’s say, a political scientist from Russia wants to know what scandal involved the son of a deputy from the ruling Ukrainian party in 2012. A search engine offers him shocking materials of the yellow press, publications from different sites contradicting one another, indignant posts of bloggers for whose opinions you cannot have any respect since they are paid-up by lobbyists. Our political scientist is ready to fall into despair; moreover, from all these publications he learns that the deputy’s son got away with an unreasonably light sentence. How to understand what you read?

Well, first of all we need to deploy an important category — time. Not only will this allow us to create a “timeline” of events (hereafter referred to as ‘spaces’ due to their spaciousness), but also to get more information “out of the blue.” In our story of a lonely political scientist some very interesting coincidences would come to light between the dates of court hearings and the dates when compromising photos of the victim girl and the unpleasant details of her mother’s biography appeared on the Internet.

The information space is lacking ease and order. You want to find the data necessary for an analysis as quickly as possible, before the idea you came up with is lost. Did you ever find yourself digging into a pile of LEGO bricks looking for the one you need? Similarly, now you are viewing multiple pages on a search engine results page to find the desired link. Imagine that the LEGO brick you’re looking for is lit, and all you have to do is reach out your hand. Similarly, the desired link can be displayed faster if you have an opportunity to specify more parameters of the required information.

The tightness of the information crammed into the flat 2D-world of a computer screen is the reason why the information flows are still beyond the control of all users and require persistence to explore selected topics.

On most websites the visitor needs to scroll down the page to see the content; the lower the text and multimedia content, the harder it is for perception. It would be much easier to understand the events and their sequence if the information was displayed from left to right — the way we normally read (if we are not talking about the Arabic script). If the slider of a video player moves in that direction, why not use it to trace the history of events?

Why should the information from a three-dimensional world be compressed in a two-dimensional space? Every web user could see the events as spatial as the world in which he or she is browsing the Wired site right now.

The time category resolves some of the issues raised, but not completely — we have to do something about the information noise. The fact that there is important and background information is undisputed and not that easy to integrate into a turnkey solution. Well, let’s continue to use the idea of ​​NATURAL and deploy another category — depth. Scale view of an event would be similar to zooming on Google Maps — you could zoom into an event and see in detail some specific information block you are interested in.

Okay, dude. That’s cool, but how would you do that?

The global nature of the issues raised here and the almost monopolistic position of Google (let’s face it) in the web search market leads us to the fact that today an adequate implementation of such an idea would only be possible in this corporation (hi, guys!).

Optimal solution consists of two stages:

Technological restructuring of information

Even today Google can use its search base to link events to specific points in time, consider their citation rates, importance and relevancy in relation to each other to stratify the information and form the data layers with interrelations and logic between them. As a result, the information can be presented in the form of “layers” or “veins” you would be pleased to operate with.

Research and editing

At this stage we need to form a community of enthusiasts, which is similar to the community of Wikipedia editors. The flows of information presented in the timeline go through the “social filter”, thus becoming more readable, comprehensible, useful and easier to perceive.

What do we get?

We release information from the influence of the authors. Conflicts are presented without any third parties involved; portraits of celebrities are not embellished by their proponents, nor are they disfigured by their opponents. Events are described without focusing too much on their participants’ emotions.

We get accuracy, clear structure, positioning of the events in a chronological order and references to all external data sources. Furthermore, the project visualizes the information. It becomes much easier to deepen the knowledge and analyze the information.

For instance, an enthusiastic INFONAUT could bring the course of several wars to a common denominator — the conditional 100% of the time. The duration of the war is of no importance (less than a week or tens of years); the events are analyzed by focusing on the structure of a war (exposition, rising action, crisis, resolution). While observing the “veins” of all wars, we could make conclusions based on previously unnoticed details. Such an analysis is practically impossible using today’s tools. In my opinion, the possibility of launching services for additional filters and systems of in-depth data analysis would entertain fans of Google APIs for quite a bit of time.

Thus, the project in question can turn those who are satisfied with lazing around on the beach into pearl divers. The ocean in which they dive is the information space. The society of people who can extract pearls of knowledge in the Huxley’s Age of Noise can make it to the unimaginable peaks in their development faster and easier. Today our attempts to use the collected data are more similar to draining pasta using a colander full of holes.

To cap it all, let us imagine that a conditional student of Columbia University selects a complicated topic for his thesis — ‘Benjamin Franklin: his political and scientific life’. What a happy coincidence. A scientist and politician, a successful newspaper editor and publisher, media manager of his time, critic of slavery, the one who extracted electrical sparks from a cloud for the first time in history, inventor of bifocals and rocking chair. As there are tens of thousands of monographs, articles, books, and research on the life of Franklin, a scientific director has a slim chance of finding a new point of view for which he has high hopes.

However, using only a timeline in research would greatly simplify the matter. Let us assume that our student has access to the Spaces as a ready for service project. Deriving only two spaces (“Franklin’s political life” and “Franklin’s scientific life”) would show interesting interrelations and lead us to a conclusion that this person’s highs and lows in all aspects of life were directly dependent on each other. Perhaps it is time that the student added a psychological aspect to his work, but that’s a different story.