Figure
5.1:
The
Internet
as
dynamic
techno-social
system.
The Internet consists of both a technological infrastructure and communicating human actors. The technical structure is medium and outcome of human agency; it enables and constrains human activity and thinking and is the result of productive social communication and cooperation processes. The technological structure/part of the Internet enables and constrains human communication and is itself produced and permanently reproduced by the human communicative part of the Internet. The Internet consists of a technological and a social subsystem that both have a networked character. Together these two parts form a technosocial system; the technological structure is a structural mass medium that produces and reproduces networked communicative and cooperative actions and is itself produced and reproduced by such practices. The Internet is not a mass medium; only its technological part functions as a reflexive medium of cognition, communication, and cooperation.
5.2. Web 1.0 as Dynamic Techno-Social System The first phase of the development of the World Wide Web (WWW, Web 1.0) was dominated by hyperlinked textual structures. In which sense is Web 1.0 a dynamic self-organizing system? Emergence in the WWW means emergence of new Web sites. The structure of the Web changes dynamically, pages disappear, reappear in alternative forms, are mirrored on other servers, new pages appear, and so on. The detailed structure of the Web can’t be known, predicted, and controlled to a full extent; its complexity steadily increases with its growth. The number of Web sites and links in the WWW is a measure of this complexity. When a new Web site is introduced, it is embedded into the existing Web and extends the latter. In order 97