Internetwork Ecology by adam muir @ AoIR2006, IR7 : Convergences - 29th of September, 2006

Internetwork Ecology by adam muir School of Arts, Griffith University

Previous methods for studying the internet are not as effective as they could be because they tend to view networked media practices as solitary activities that exist on their own. Internetwork Ecology suggests that we should examine networked media as they exist together as part of a larger context of everyday media use. What happens when we treat the networks that make up the internet as though they were organised in the way that ecological systems are organised?
Though human-made the Internet is not centrally designed. Structurally, the internet is closer to an ecosystem than to a Swiss watch. (Barabasi, 2002 : 145) "...the sheer density of informational devices is beginning to create something like a digital ecology... This top-to-bottom, inside-and-out connectivity, uniquely in the history of technological development, has created its own ecology an ecology based on interconnectivity that is becoming more pervasive. To live in the digital ecology is to live within a chronoscopic temporality of the constant present." (Thrift, 2004 : 470-471) Internetwork Ecology asks us as internet researchers to view the internet as a complex system of interconnected parts that make up the whole experience we have when engaging with the technology; as something similar to what biological ecology calls an ecosystem. The internet is more than just a single entity that we can study with certainty using prior ideas of virtual community as existing solely online without the broader context of everyday media use, and so on. The discussion in this paper is very general due to presentation time constraints. I will draw together some of the existing literature and then discuss how we might define some of the key concepts that feed into this idea of internetwork ecology. For the purposes of this paper I will not be referring to the existing literature in several fields of inquiry that employ notions of holistic, complex systems as part of their approach; the fields of media ecology, information ecology, and the areas of cultural ecology and ecological anthropology. Each of those disciplines contributes concepts to the development of the larger picture of Internetwork Ecology. But for the sake of brevity, only the networking aspects will be discussed in this paper.

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Internetwork Ecology by adam muir @ AoIR2006, IR7 : Convergences - 29th of September, 2006

Why the name Internetwork Ecology ? I will briefly dissect the title and explain some of the concepts from these disciplines and how they are related. Internetworks are: ... interconnected networks. ... what the word "internet" (which I choose to write with a lower case i) refers to. ... not random in their structure, they are defined by many-tiered Protocols (such as TCP/IP) which define their functions, limitations, and their relationships with other networks (Galloway, 2004). Protocol helps us to identify networks, by commonality. "The internet... grows and evolves at an unparalleled rate while following the same laws that nature uses to spin its own webs." (Barabasi, 2002 : 159). A common example of protocol: The internet runs on the TCP/IP protocol suite that most internet users take for granted. No matter what operating system you run, if you want your computer to talk to the majority of other computers on the internet you most likely use the TCP/IP standard. Defining Networks in Other Contexts Other networks you might choose to identify include social networks developed through the usual means, whether they are online or offline doesn't matter at this point.

... actor networks? ... IM and Chat networks - Contact Lists ... "social networking" sites... eg: MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Consumating, et al. ... blogosphere - Blogs via Blogrolls; LiveJournal (and clones) via flist, etc ...p2p networks - many flavours, including torrents. ... MMOGs and other networked multiplayer games ... the contacts in your mobile cellular telephone... or are these all offline?

Most people who are regular internet users employ a combination of these programs to maintain their computer-mediated social networks. If we return to the starting point of our internetwork (at the computer or technical level of hardware and protocols), and we add the applications or software that we use to maintain our other sense of networks again each with it's own protocols to define them through commonality- we can begin to appreciate the interrelated nature of the organisation of internetworks. Centered on an individual user, each of the networks thus identified helps to define what Barry Wellman refers to as networked individualism. Wellman notices that there has been "... a change of emphasis from place-to-place connectivity... to person-to-person connectivity based on individuals making and remaking connections in their social and computer networks..." (Wellman, 2002 : 5). At this point we have an idea of the networked individual who interacts across, and through, a range of networks defined at different scales, defined by different protocols, that are all part of the extended computermediated network patterns of the Internetworked Individual.

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Internetwork Ecology by adam muir @ AoIR2006, IR7 : Convergences - 29th of September, 2006

So what about ecology? Traditionally Biological Ecology is concerned with the interrelationship of organisms and their environments; typically ecology views environments as systems, and examines how the parts of those systems work together to make up the whole.
As a digression of sorts, a clarification: There is a certain usage of the term ecology by non-ecologists who like the idea of using the holistic system as a metaphor. You frequently encounter such usage as an ecology of [something]... or ..Ecologies of [something].... Ecology is the name of a branch of biology, and is thus the name of a discipline, like anthropology or geography, or chemistry. It is not a unit of measuring complex, holistic systems and their emergent properties. If you are reading this and you are guilty of doing this (Yes, I'm looking at you media ecology, information ecology and network ecology people!), and you want to use a unit of measurement for ecological systems, use the word ecosystem.... or at different spatial and temporal scales, you can use community or population, plus there are other ways of referring to these kinds of systems. Check out some biological ecology literature for yourself.

In biological ecology people study natural systems where the sum total of the parts in the system is more than the parts alone would suggest, the resulting emergent properties being a matter of interest to researchers. In biological ecology, the issue of scale (both temporal and spatial) is important. Once we have designated a geographical region to study we might look at all the individuals in one species, plant or animal, and those individuals are referred to as a population. When we want to examine several species and how they interact, the next layer of distribution, bringing more than one population together, is referred to as a community. (Perhaps a little different to the traditional view of the 'virtual community'). Moving up in scale, if we take the communities in a larger area and combine them with the non-living things, the sun and rain and so on, we get the ecosystem. Ecosystems are comprised of lots of different parts - which, most importantly, can be modeled as networks, of inter-connected parts that all work together to make something that is more than the sum of those parts (Kitching, 1983; Odum & Odum, 2000). There are other layers of complexity in biological ecology, and other interesting concepts that we can adapt to understanding the internet (see Odum, 1959; Odum, 1997, and Krebs, 2001) , but for the sake of brevity that's all that will be discussed in relation to biological ecology. How do these ideas fit together? In biological ecology, just like in sociology and anthropology, we can represent populations and communities as networks to show their spatial distribution and their interactions (Kitching, 1983 Odum & Odum, 2000). If we pick all the individuals of a species, that is a population of individuals, and map them as a network (joined by a commonality as defined by protocol, spatial distribution, etc), we find that we can bring together these ideas from biological ecology and internetworking theory. So we arrive at the end point where we have several networks, a community of networked individuals. When you combine these communities of networks with the outside forces that can shape networks

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Internetwork Ecology by adam muir @ AoIR2006, IR7 : Convergences - 29th of September, 2006

(economic policy, or the politics of networks) then the result is a complex system similar in dynamic to an ecosystem (Huberman, 2001). Map these interactions as network diagrams, networks of networks, you come back to the notion of internetworks. We can begin to appreciate that what people do with the internet is more than just one thing at a time. There are people who are purely utilitarian with their use, and they might just use email, or just browse the web occasionally. They don't use the internet to socialise, per se. So perhaps they are not the audience of Internetworked Individuals described by these concepts. However, perhaps you are like me and when you go online you do many things all at once - you check your email, read blogs, leave comments for your friends, download stuff - you're maintaining a whole raft of networks all sort of stacked up. So you have your Real Life networks bleeding through to online networks. Rather than having virtual communities as defined by all the people on a website like MySpace, or all the users in a chat room, we have to remember that these users are most likely connected via many media, to yet more users who are also connected to their own internetworks. A whole host of Networked Individuals connected to other Networked Individuals. Previous methods of internet studies never fully explained my experience of being a computer- networked individual for about half of my life. I can't help but agree with Mitchell when he makes the observation that "...increasingly, my sense of continuity and belonging derives from being electronically networked to the widely scattered people and places I care about..." (Mitchell, 2003 : 17). Further to this point Mitchell asserts that the days of using networked technologies in mostly benign and instrumental ways may have passed for many people, as networks become a more dominant frame of reference in our daily existence: I am inseparable from my ever-expanding, ever-changing networks, but they do not tie me down... [yet] ...disconnection would be amputation. I am part of the networks, and the networks are part of me. I show up in directories. I am visible to Google. I link, therefore I am (ibid : 61 62). What does this mean for internet researchers? One of the benefits of this approach is that it is open to a lot of other methods of study that you might want to employ. You could connect these ideas to most of the research projects that are being presented at this conference. Some of these ideas could join up to ethnography or to actor network theory, for example. So from this short presentation today you can begin to see the basic premise behind internetwork ecology as an inclusive way to examine the varied media practices of networked individuals. Internetwork Ecology invites us to think about other factors that contribute to our computer-mediated experience beyond the usual frames of reference that internet studies falls back on online / offline, virtual / actual, cyberspace / real life, etc. We should move beyond the simplistic ideas of "virtual community" as existing only online. One way of

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Internetwork Ecology by adam muir @ AoIR2006, IR7 : Convergences - 29th of September, 2006

achieving this is to see the internet as enabling communication between networks of individuals, and not concern ourselves with distinctions between online or offline. As the writing of Mitchell (2003) and Wellman (2002) illustrates we are not necessarily just arbitrary groups of individuals whose commonality is a shared spatial arrangement. We are all internetworked individuals whose experience of networked media is much richer than prior research in internet studies and new media has described.

References: Barabasi, A. (2002). Linked: The new science of networks. Cambridge, MA; Perseus Publishing. Galloway, A. (2004). Protocol: how control exists after decentralization. Cambridge MA; MIT Press. Huberman, B. (2001). Laws of the Web: Patterns in the Ecology of Information. Cambridge, MA; MIT Press. Kitching, R. (1983). Systems Ecology: an introduction to ecological modelling. St Lucia, QLD, University of Queensland Press. Krebs, C. J. (2001). Ecology: the experimental analysis of distribution and abundance. San Francisco, CA; Benjamin Cummings. Mitchell, W. (2003). Me++: The cyborg self and the networked city. Cambridge; MIT Press. Odum, E. (1959). Fundamentals of Ecology. United States; W.B. Saunders Co. Odum, E. (1997). Ecology: a bridge between science and society. Sunderland, MA; Sinauer Associates. Odum, H. T. & Odum, E. C. (2000). Modeling for all scales: an introduction to system simulation. San Diego, CA; Academic Press. Thrift, N. (2004). Electric Animals: New models of everyday life? in Cultural Studies, 18: 461 482. Wellman, B. (2002). "Designing the Internet for a Networked Society: Little Boxes, Glocalization, and Networked Individualism in Communications of the ACM, May 2002. Acknowledgments:
This paper is part of a longer PhD project that has received support and financial assistance from the School of Arts @ Griffith University ( http://www.griffith.edu.au/school/art/ ) and the Centre for Public Culture and Ideas @ Griffith University ( http://www.griffith.edu.au/centre/cpci/ ).

Original Presentation layout using the S5 dynamic webpage slideshow code by Eric A. Meyer. This paper was written on OpenOffice 2.0, and Formatted with PDFCreator v0.9.2 ( http://www.pdfforge.org/ ).

Author Bio from the AoIR2006 Conference Booklet: Adam Muir is a currently completing a PhD in the area of Internetwork Ecology. His research examines the intersection of many aspects of CyberCulture and everyday aspects of Internet usage. His recent publications include an article on the everyday internet for the Griffith Review entitled Virtual Strangers, Imaginary Friends, and also an article co-authored with Stephen Stockwell on information warfare and the post-911 media for the FibreCulture Journal.

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