Scott Van Den Plas : Philosopher

I’ve broken down my thoughts on this question into five distinct parts, this is the first of those five.

The foundation of communication is hierarchical and will continue to be so in the short term.

The human process of communication is easy to generalize: we either speak to one or to many and listen to one or to many. I can disseminate a message to one person or to an entire group of people and they can do the same back to me. An artist can speak to generations to come through one piece. A philosopher can endure for thousands of years on an ideological masterpiece. The speaker may change, but the message can be passed down through a communication legacy. The hierarchy of human communication is essentially the broadcasting of the message, through a human network.

The technological aspect of communications is harder to generalize, but easier to actually spell out in specific. There are finite sets of rules around modern mass communications. We have built enormous industries around marketing, networking, communication, and the offshoots of each. Our communications systems have suffered evolution of technology and perception. The magic of our system today is the invisibility of the inner-workings and the visibility of the message. They work fairly seamlessly, and the only time we are aware of the system as users is when it fails.

In the past, there have been enormous changes in the hierarchy of human communications, but the largest shifts have been accompanied by a corresponding step forward in the enabling technology. Telephone, radio, television, movies, and now the converged network of the Internet have all shifted how we as both individuals and a society communicate. They have changed the scale on which we can communicate, as well as the style in which we do so. The infamous Kennedy versus Nixon debate, simulcast on both television and radio is an excellent example of a shift in style. By all accounts from the audience listening on the radio, Nixon soundly won the debate. Those who saw the virile young Kennedy on television contrasted by the sickly looking Nixon received a different message. The verbal content was identical on either, but vast difference in physical appearance of the candidates delivered a more powerful message of its own. Technological advancements not only change the reachable scale of the hierarchy, but the manner in which we contact it.

Van Jacobson, an engineer responsible for many of the base tools used in networking and communications today, is a subscriber to an interesting theory of networking. I agree with his characterization of where communications has come from, as well as the probable next step. Circuit switched data is the foundation of the vanilla telephone system. There is quite literally a physical line connecting point A to point B, and the message is carried across that line. As the phone system scaled larger, congestion was controlled by even larger switches. There was a paradigm shift in the 1960’s that lead us to the foundation of network communications. This shift was toward breaking data up into smaller pieces called packets, and then addressing those packets for a destination, but letting the intermediary destinations make the decision as to how the packet arrived. The packet approach introduced a new type of hierarchy into communication based off of a standardized network stack. Information is encapsulated as it travels down this network stack into raw signals, those signals are sent to the next step in the network, analyzed for addressing data, and then forwarded on to the next hop towards the destination. Each individual node of the network doesn’t actually care where the destination is, it only cares about the next step toward that destination.

This approach has given a much more immensely scalable network with indifference to content. I can just as easily send video, text, voice, and many other sorts of information across one network, but it comes with some of its own problems. Network congestion and bottlenecks are an increasing concern. We have alleviated some of these problems with smart caching and proxies, but these are stop gap measures on a much larger problem. There is another emerging standard, the next evolutionary jump in communications. The data itself will become smarter. The next level of networking communications will disseminate content using a distributed network of users and devices all hosting authoritative content. We are seeing the beginnings of this type of system with distributed downloaders such as BitTorrent, a program that allows a distributed network of users with a centralized tracking server to simultaneously upload and download content from each other. Eventually, this sort of system will have to be pervasive in order to be effective, and will have to be written into the communications protocol.

This distributed authoritative system will, however, allow us to builder smarter mesh networks, at first at the boundaries of the system hierarchy, and then eventually supplanting some of the functions of the core. If, for instance, I would like to make a phone call to my neighbor who is within range of my network or a network close to mine, there is no reason for my communication to move across the core. We should be able, with smart enough devices and smart enough data, to speak directly to each other. First we saw the physical circuit switched network, then the metaphysical packet switched network, and the next generation of network hierarchy will be the data switched network. We will see, in the immediate future, a continued trend toward consolidation of services, continued hierarchical growth at the core, and increased congestion problems. This will, in turn, give more momentum to the data switched movement. The core will remain as a hierarchy, but the democratization of the edge has begun. The smart edge will grow, and mesh networks will flourish.