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Old 17-06-05, 08:18 PM   #5
Mazer
Earthbound misfit
 
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Join Date: May 2001
Location: Moses Lake, Washington
Posts: 2,563
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Computer network teleogoly? Sounds like an interesting field to get into. A hundred years from now sociologists will study how the internet has affected world cultures both globally and locally, and in a thousand years paleoanthropologists will pour over Internet Archive and gmail databases studying our lives and our friendships. Maybe they'll see an organic structure in the connections we've made with each other, but since we're only small parts of this system it's difficult for us to see the big picture. Maybe our social spaces aren't organic, maybe they're crystalline or fractal in nature. The thing to remeber is that these computer networks don't perfectly mirror our social networks. There's a physical infrastructure and backbone that we don't need to be aware of in order to function as a community, but upon which the internet relies to do what it does.

Some people don't believe that design, devine or otherwise, has anything to do with biological evolution, but I don't think it can be denied that design is an integral part of technological evolution. People don't adapt themselves to their surroundings, they adapt their surroundings to themselves, and our creations are imbued with the purposes we intend for them. Teleology, while parallel to this discussion, doens't really apply here. If a computer network manifests aspects of organic function then it's probably because it is facilitating human communication. That doesn't mean that these systems never exhibit organic traits, but because they are subject to constant artificial selection by their users they will never develop complex organic systems on their own like the ones we see in biology.
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