by Jeff Stibel
The Neurogrid chip was featured in the aforementioned October 2009 Discover magazine article. The most recent scientific data were presented by Swadesh Choudhary, Steven Sloan, Sam Fok, Alexander Neckar, Eric Trautmann, Peiran Gao, Terry Stewart, Chris Eliasmith, and Kwabena Boahen in their article, “Silicon Neurons that Compute,” presented at the International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks in 2012. Additional information on Stanford’s Neurogrid project can be found on the following website: http://www.stanford.edu/group/brainsinsilicon/neurogrid.html.
Chapter 4 – Slaves | Neurons | The Web
Howard Topoff has published several influential articles about the behavior of slave-making ants, including “Slave-Making Ants” in American Scientist 78, no. 6 (November–December 1990): 520–528; and “Colony Founding by Queens of the Obligatory Slave_making Ant, Polyergus breviceps: The Role of the Dufour’s Gland,” co-written with Stefan Cover, Les Greenberg, Linda Goodloe, and Peter Sherman in Ethology 78, no. 3 (1988): 209–218.
For more information about slave-making ants, I would refer you again to Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson’s The Ants (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990). For a general overview, see
R. Deslippe’s article, “Social Parasitism in Ants,” published in Nature Education Knowledge 3, no. 10 (2010): 27.
I
Much of this section, specifically the information on how ideas leap from one brain to another, comes from Richard Dawkins’s insight of a meme—an idea that behaves similarly to a gene—first discussed in The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). Dawkins defines a meme as “an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.” Despite the title of the book, Dawkins makes a subtle yet critical point: that higher level biological systems can act selflessly despite having underlying selfish genes. This theory can explain how kin and other related parties can be altruistic, as they are protecting the greater species or underlying genes. There is some debate about certain details of kin selection, and Edward O. Wilson (who recently argued against natural selection in the journal Nature) and Dawkins are in the middle of an academic argument regarding the outcome. (See Nowak, Martin A., Corina E. Tarnita, and Edward O. Wilson, “The Evolution of Eusociality,” Nature 466, no. 7310 (2010): 1057–1062.) Regardless, the selfish gene theory speaks to how ideas can act selfishly and propagate; it also explains how neurons can act selflessly and commit cellular suicide, a topic that is expanded upon throughout this chapter.
The quote from Deborah Gordon is from Ant Encounters: Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
II
The story of Jill Price is nothing short of fascinating, and numerous articles have been written about her. The original journal article (with Price’s name redacted) can be found here: E. S. Parker, L. Cahill, and J. L. McGaugh, “A Case of Unusual Autobiographical Remembering,” Neurocase 12, no. 1 (February 2006): 35–49. For a more personal account, see the book Price coauthored with Bart Davis: The Woman Who Can’t Forget: The Extraordinary Story of Living with the Most Remarkable Memory Known to Science—A Memoir (New York: Free Press, 2008).
III
It is interesting to see the massive number of zeros that makes up a zettabyte, which you can view on a Wikipedia page dedicated to the number: wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettabyte.
The web stats are from Nielsen and Pew Research Center and include the fact that we each view 2,600 web pages and 90 sites per month. Huffington Post published an infographic by Visual Economics, which used this data in the article, “Internet Usage Statistics: How We Spend Our Time Online,” by Catharine Smith, published June 22, 2010.
IV
The full bibliographical information for the articles and books named in this section are as follows: Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” The Atlantic, July/August 2008; Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010); Larry Rosen, iDisorder: Understanding Our Obsession with Technology and Overcoming Its Hold on Us (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Daniel Sieberg, The Digital Diet: The 4-Step Plan to Break Your Tech Addiction and Regain Balance in Your Life (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2011); Dr. Kimberly Young, Caught in the Net: How to Recognize the Signs of Internet Addiction—and a Winning Strategy for Recovery (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1998); and Tangled in the Web: Understanding Cybersex from Fantasy to Addiction (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2001).
V
The USA Today article about the size of the web, entitled “Internet Suffering from Information Overload,” was written by Andrew Kantor and published on June 14, 2007.
The over 800 percent growth in the number of websites figure comes from a study by Edward T. O’Neill, Brian F. Lavoie, and Rick Bennett, “Trends in the Evolution of the Public Web 1998–2002,” D-Lib Magazine 9, no. 4 (2008): 1–10. The number 19 percent is from data available for 2011 and 2012 from Netcraft’s “Web Server Survey,” which is published every month and available at news.netcraft.com.
Neilson reported in 2012 that fewer people used the web on their PCs in 2012 than in 2011, the first year that this has happened. I expect this number will continue to decline. Read “State of the Media: The Social Media Report 2012” by Nielsen for more details. The article can be downloaded at neilson.com, but you must register first.
Data firm Flurry also released stats in December 2012 showing an increase in app usage and a decline in the amount of time people spent using the web on PCs (from 72 minutes in 2011 to 70 minutes in 2012). Their data is a composite from comScore, Alexa, and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. See TechCrunch’s article, “Time Spent in Mobile Apps Is Starting to Challenge Television, Flurry Says,” by Kim-Mai Cutler and published on December 5, 2012. Note that this is the source for the data used in Image 4.1.
Chris Anderson published an article in Wired magazine in 2010 with the headline, “The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet.” The headline and commentary was prescient but the stats were unfortunately wrong. He leveraged a graph from Cisco which showed the web in decline since 2000 but the decline was a result of breaking out different components of the web, such as video. He was deeply criticized—in particular by Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle—for the blunder. Battelle summarized it well by stating, “As a last word, I’d like to say that if the scope of the piece was really just about the web as a viable model for ‘professional content’ as we see it, then splashing ‘The Death of the Web’ on the cover might be, well, overstating the case just a wee bit . . .” Fast forward to today and the web is in decline but even with that news, it is not dying; it is growing stronger.
CNN reported on January 28, 2011, in an article entitled “108 Apps per iPhone” by Philip Elmer-DeWitt about the mobile usage stats presented in this section, which were derived from an Appsfire infographic about app usage. Appsfire found that the average iPhone user has 108 apps and spends 84 minutes a day using them. The Flurry data, discussed above, found that smartphone owners use apps for 127 minutes per day. I used the latter 127 minutes figure because it is a more current source.
In another highly relevant white paper that can be downloaded at cisco.com, “Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2011–2016,” Cisco predicted that global mobile data traffic will increase by a factor of 18 by 2016.
VI
A similar approach to what I am describing is the semantic web, which has been proposed by World Wide Web founder Tim Berners-Lee. The problem with the semantic web, however, is in both the limitation of its scope and the difficulty of actually implementing it. Berners-Lee first proposed the idea in 2001, and we still have not made significant progress toward those goals, as Berners-Lee has indicated over the years. See Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, and Ora Lassila, “The Semantic Web,” Scientific American 284, no. 5 (2001): 28–37.
VII
The quote about electricity comes from “Nature’s Revenge on Genius,” Nature: A Weekly Journal for the Gentleman Sportsman, Tourist and Naturalist, vol 1, no. 1 (November 2, 1889), Nature Publishing Group.
Chapter 5 – Bread | Mobile | Social
The bread distribution story was recounted in Paul Seabright’s masterpiece about economic networks, The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). A slightly different version of the story was presented by Jonas Eliasson at a September 2012 TED conference.
I
Tom Anderson, who called himself “Lord Flathead,” was a computer hacker from the tender age of 13. Many articles have been written about his early days, including a comprehensive one by Michael Arrington of Tech Crunch entitled “MySpace Cofounder Tom Anderson Was a Real Life ‘WarGames’ Hacker in the 1980s,” printed in August 30, 2008.
This section references Wired for Thought: How the Brain Is Shaping the Future of the Internet (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2009).
II
The original research for Robin Dunbar’s number was on primates: “Neocortex Size as a Constraint on Group Size in Primates,” Journal of Human Evolution 20 (1992): 469–493. Dunbar later went on to write a book that went into deeper detail: Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). His work on human social networks is summed up in this article: “Social Network Size in Humans,” Human Nature 14, no. 1 (2003): 53–72. A number of great studies have applied Dunbar’s number to the internet in general and to social networks in particular. See Bruno Goncalves, Nicola Perra, and Alessandro Vespignani, “Modeling Users’ Activity on Twitter Networks: Validation of Dunbar’s Number,” Bulletin of the American Physical Society 57, no. 1 (2012); or Russell Hill, R. Alexander Bentley, and Robin Dunbar, “Network Scaling Reveals Consistent Fractal Pattern in Hierarchical Mammalian Societies,” Biology Letters 4, no. 6 (2008): 748–751.
Edison Research found in June 2012 that the average Facebook user has 262 friends. Their report is called “The Social Habit 2012.”
The network of the brain is built on clusters of neurons, each tightly connected. These clusters then connect to other clusters and eventually form one network composed of many subnetworks—a “network of networks.” The beauty of the brain is that it allows the overall network to grow while maintaining equilibrium within its subnetworks. This is very similar to the strategy that Facebook employed in the early days of the network’s growth.
Facebook’s web versus mobile stats, as well as the other social networks, are from the aforementioned Nielsen social media report.
Writer Paul Boutin outlined new features released for Facebook’s mobile interface in a January 2, 2013, article in the New York Times entitled “More Facebook Changes, Aimed at Users on the Go.”
Google’s Horowitz made his remarks during a 2012 conference in New York City. It was reported on by Steve Kovach in Business Insider on November 28, 2012, in his article entitled “The Google+ Boss Just Brilliantly Deconstructed Everything Annoying About Facebook.”
Mark Zuckerberg’s quote about Instagram comes from an April 9, 2012, New York Times article entitled “Facebook Buys Instagram for $1 Billion” by Evelyn M. Rusli. New York Times pulled the quote from Zuckerberg’s Facebook profile page.
III
The always insightful Kevin Kelly has several great TED talks. If you only watch one, my favorite is “The Next 5,000 Days of the Web” from 2007, where this quote comes from.
Stories of social media gaffes are literally everywhere you look. The story of a Canadian woman named Nathalie Blanchard who lost her disability benefits was reported by Ki Mae Heussner of ABC News on November 23, 2009: “Woman Loses Benefits after Posting Facebook Pics.” Mashable reported on June 28, 2010, “Facebook Becoming a Prime Source for Divorce Case Evidence.” The Washington Post’s Katie Rogers reported “Kenneth Cole’s Egypt Tweet” on February 3, 2011. The New York Times reported on the Domino’s video prank on April 15, 2009 (“Video Prank at Domino’s Taints Brand”), and USA Today reported on Taco Bell’s beef lawsuit on April 21, 2011 (“Yum Execs: Lawsuit Still Hurting Taco Bell Sales).
Chapter 6 – Chiefs | Search | Context
Information about Marisa Mayer and her career history can be found at http://www.biography.com/people/marissa-mayer-20902689.
Mayer’s quote comes from Bernard Girard’s book The Google Way: How One Company Is Revolutionizing Management as We Know It (San Francisco: No Starch Press, 2009).
I
Information on the history of Yahoo! can be found on their website at http://docs.yahoo.com/info/misc/history.html or on Wikipedia. The Wall Street Journal also has a nice timeline and infographic called “The Story of a Struggling Internet Pioneer” published on July 17, 2012.
Number of pages added to the web is reported by Google and can be found at: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was
-big.html.
Wikipedia has by far the most comprehensive overview of Google Search, with a litany of references. For history buffs and tech geeks, an original article on Google PageRank can be found at Stanford: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html.
The full bibliographies for the books noted in this section are Terry Winograd, Understanding Natural Language (Academic Press, 1972); Language as a Cognitive Process (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1983); and Understanding Computers and Cognition (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1987).
III
Irina Slutsky reported that 358 out of approximately 3,600 Facebook employees used to work at Google in her June 1, 2011, article in AdAge, “Meet the Ex-Googlers Running Facebook.”
For more on what happened with Facebook’s Beacon, check out PC Magazine’s November 2007 article, “Facebook’s Beacon More Intrusive Than Previously Thought.” You can also view Mark Zuckerberg’s mea culpa when the company agreed to take down the service as a result of the backlash: https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post
=10150378701937131.
Kevin Kelly’s quote comes from the above referenced 2007 TED talk, “The Next 5,000 Days of the Web.”
IV
Mayer’s quote comes from an article in the November 2009 PCWorld article entitled “Google VP Mayer Describes the Perfect Search Engine”
Chapter 7 – Crowds | Poets | Shakespeare
Harvard historian Robert Darnton wrote an entire book about “The Affair of the Fourteen.” It’s a work of impressive scholarship that also happens to be highly entertaining: Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010).
II
For more information on the chronometer competition—called the Longitude Prize—visit the National Museum of the Royal Navy at http://www
.royalnavalmuseum.org/info_sheets_john_harrison.htm. DesignCrowd also created an infographic about crowdsourcing throughout history that can be viewed at http://blog.designcrowd.com/article/202/crowd
sourcing-is-not-new—the-history-of-crowdsourcing-1714-to-2010. The group rightly points out that even reality TV shows like American Idol are, in essence, crowdsourced contests.
The Guardian reported about the slowdown and breakpoint of Wikipedia, with some of the stats used in this chapter in the November 25, 2009, article by Jack Schofield, “Have You Stopped Editing Wikipedia? And If So, Is It Doomed?” No surprise, but the best information on Wikipedia is on Wikipedia. You can read more about Wikipedia’s current size and past growth in its article, “Wikipedia: Size of Wikipedia.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia. Wikipedia’s strategic plan is available for review at http://wikimediafoundation
.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strategic_Plan_Summary. For an interesting discussion of Wikipedia’s future, see the Wall
Street Journal classroom edition article from January 2010, “What’s Wrong with Wikipedia?” by Julia Angwin and Geoffrey A. Fowler.
Stats on the Encyclopedia Britannica, as compared to Wikipedia, come from “Wikipedia: Size Comparisons” from Wikipedia. The graph data come from “Wikipedia: Modelling Wikipedia’s Growth” from Wikipedia. More information about the various ways to graph Wikipedia’s growth can be found on that page.
Quote from the Encyclopedia Britannica CEO comes from the New York Times March 14, 2012, article by Julie Bosman entitled “MEDIA DECODER; Britannica Is Reduced to a Click.”
Quotes from Wikipedia board member Mathias Schindler and Carnegie Mellon professor Aniket Kittur come from the aforementioned January 2010 Wall Street Journal article by Julia Angwin and Geoffrey A. Fowler entitled “What’s Wrong With Wikipedia?”
For more information about Jorge Cauz and his transformation of Encyclopaedia Britannica for the internet age, see the article he wrote for the March 2013 issue of Harvard Business Review entitled “Encyclopaedia Brittanica’s President on Killing Off a 244-Year-Old Product.”
III
The story of James Murray and his role in the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary is available in—where else?—the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (http://www.oxforddnb.com/public/dnb/35163
.html), and also in a January 13, 2011, Wired Magazine article by Nate Lanxon entitled “How the Oxford English Dictionary Started out Like Wikipedia.” For a more nuanced account, see Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005). The quote about the idea behind the Oxford English Dictionary is found in the preface to volume 1.